


On My Way Home

by a_gay_poster



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: Established Relationship, Found Family, GaaLee Fest 2019, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2020-10-06 13:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20507411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: There is nothing now that Gaara, the man, can do to heal the wounds caused by Gaara, the monster. He cannot bring murdered villagers back from the dead. He cannot un-traumatize the children he terrorized in his youth. He cannot even repair the desert ecosystem that he disrupted during his massive, sand-filled rages. All he can do is be a safe harbor - level, and steady, and reliable as the sunrise - for his village, for his family, and for his friends.Written for the GaaLee Summertime of Love Fest 2019, Day 16: Start a long overdue project!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been a long time in the making. I originally conceived of it back in late 2017/early 2018 for an entirely different event, so it was the perfect fit for a prompt that encourages picking up and dusting off old WIPs! This story is based on [this beautiful artwork by @jingleboy on Tumblr](http://jingleboy.tumblr.com/post/165150846390) and the song [Clark Griswold by The Hilltop Hoods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_XVw0235gY).
> 
> I'm not sure what the update schedule will look like for this story, because only the first chapter is written. It should be between 6-8 chapters when complete. (Also, because I didn't realize that Day 16 of the fest fell on a Tuesday, I'm going to post my update for Homespun, Heartfelt, and Handmade tomorrow, then resume the regular every-Tuesday posting schedule for that fic.)
> 
> Also, check out the rest of the [Summertime of Love Fest](https://puregaalee.tumblr.com/post/184654222850/gaalee-festival-2019every-way-i-could-love-you) on Tumblr or search #gaaleefest19!

A sandstorm is no remarkable occurrence in Suna, but that makes it no less dangerous.

Suna’s villagers have grown up subjected to the vagaries of the storms’ wills, which leaves them wary, battened down in their houses with their storm shutters closed, cloth stuffed under their doors to block the wind. Red chalk warding signs adorn every door and window, and the villagers huddle together in their houses’ largest rooms, fires blazing in their hearths and prayers upon their lips. 

The only exception is Gaara. He prowls the village streets during the storms like a wraith, slipping between buildings and down alleyways, eyes keenly searching for any sign of disturbance. He doesn’t bother with storm gear: the heavy, waxen cloaks and thick, reinforced goggles that every Suna shinobi carries in their pack, in the event a storm should sneak up on them unawares out in the desert. Gaara has his mother’s gift to protect him, and it surrounds him like a blanket, a warm, reassuring curl of grit and chakra that wraps his face and limbs as he makes his rounds, ever the protector of his village. 

No shinobi in their right mind would dare to attack Suna during a sandstorm, but Gaara has learned in his years as Kazekage that very few enemies are in their right minds at all. 

It brings him only a small measure of surprise when he hears someone crying out in the storm. A child’s voice, high and reedy, carried and distorted by the whipping of the wind and the howl of the storm. It’s not uncommon, exactly, for children to become separated from their parents in the storms, particularly if it descends upon the village suddenly; but this storm has been raging for hours after slowly brewing in the desert over days, and Gaara had warned the villagers up to almost the very moment the storm was set to begin. 

It’s difficult to trace any sound in the midst of a sandstorm, the swirl of the air tangling sound and obscuring the source, but Gaara is an expert. He can find _anything_ in his village, so long as his sand can touch it. He casts his sand out in a loose net, seeking flickers of life, and hurries forward cautiously, just in case it’s a trap. 

It’s the work of moments to find the child, crouched and shadowed in the middle of a residential street. Sand swirls darkly around him, carrying an odd, hazy patina of gray. He’s found his way almost to the exact eye of the storm, wearing only the standard cloak children wear when running errands, not a shred of storm gear to be seen. _Where are his parents?_ Gaara casts his chakra wide, feather-light tendrils swirling between buildings, but he feels no sign of life other than the trembling chakra of his villagers behind their houses’ walls. 

The child has red ochre striping his face, the paint’s waxy sheen dusty with grit - a puppeteer’s child. Gaara narrows his eyes, searching his memory, but he cannot recall ever seeing the boy before. 

Then the boy looks up at him, his eyebrows furrowed and his face drawn and hardened. His dark green eyes flare with _hate_ and _fear_. 

Gaara takes a startled step backwards. He knows that gaze. He’s _worn_ that gaze. That same face, those same teartracks. His heart pounds; his hand reaches for the boy instinctively.

Black sand swirls up around the boy in a miasma. Gaara sniffs - his sense of smell is acute, a relic of the tanuki spirit that once inhabited his body - and the wind carries notes of quartz and mica, iron and copper. _Blood_. Gaara scans the boy’s form for injuries and sees nothing apparent, no stains of dark red on his tan cloak or puddling in the sand beneath his feet. The scent is strong, though, even as Gaara moves closer and the iron filings coalesce into a halo of daggers. 

Gaara’s skin prickles with static electricity, the boy’s immense chakra pushing up against the boundaries of Gaara’s own, oppressive and wild. The boy snarls at him, feral. Gaara recognizes the tingling of his pores - _Magnet Release_. Who _is_ this boy?

Gaara’s sand curls from the gourd on his hip instinctively, defensively. He dismisses it with a flick of his fingers, pushing it into a loose sphere around them to block the wind and the storm. 

Gaara steps forward. The boy clenches his fist. Iron daggers pierce Gaara’s upper back. _Pain_ \- he hasn’t felt that in a while. He’s unable to stifle a groan through clenched teeth as he drops to his knees in front of the boy. With just a thought, his sand pulses outward, strengthening, creating a defensive wall that batters off the worst of the sandstorm’s winds. Midday sunshine hazes through the lingering grit in the air, lighting up the boy’s tiny body where he’s curled like a frightened animal. 

Far above, the sky is clear and blue. Once the storm passes, it will be a beautiful day. 

The boy blinks up at him, dust caught in his wet eyelashes, furious and questioning. He raises a defensive hand, and his stubby fingers shake. Chakra crackles in the air between them like an electric fence. 

Gaara’s heart aches for him. He’s so _small_. It’s hard to believe anything that size could hurt him. 

It’s hard to believe that Gaara was himself once that size. 

He isn’t sure what he’s thinking - maybe he’s not thinking at all, tapped into raw emotion between the roar of the storm and the screaming of his heart - when he wraps his arms around the boy and squeezes. 

A tiny fist clutches the front of his jacket, knuckles digging into Gaara’s breastbone. A whimper cuts the air. The boy pounds weakly on Gaara’s chest. His eyelashes flutter like a bird’s broken wings against the side of Gaara’s face. He’s _exhausted_, a hair’s breadth from unconsciousness from chakra depletion. Dyscontrol flutters in the last weak curls of his chakra. The Iron Sand begins to drop from the air, making heavy piles on Gaara’s shoulders. 

“I’ll teach you how to use your power,” Gaara murmurs, over the howl of the distant wind. He pauses, and the boy’s hand falls still. “What’s your name?”

“Shinki.” 

His body weighs hardly anything when Gaara lifts him, and in just a moment the boy’s form sags with sleep, face pillowed on Gaara’s shoulder. 

Gaara shields Shinki’s slack face with a hand as he activates his Sand Transportation jutsu. 

Kankuro looks up, astonished, when Gaara materializes in the _genkan_ of the Kazekage manor. 

“The hell?”

“Shh,” Gaara hushes him, cupping a hand over the boy’s exposed ear. His hair is stuck to his sleeping face with dirt and sweat. They’re filthy, the both of them, and a small pile of dust and debris gathers next to the tidy row of indoor slippers as Gaara shucks his coat and shoes, careful not to disturb the boy. _Shinki_, he reminds himself. _His name is Shinki._

“I just swept that,” Kankuro chides him, furrowed brow still scanning the child on Gaara’s shoulder.

“You knew a sandstorm was coming,” Gaara snaps back, and starts making his way to Metal’s currently unoccupied room. It has the most appropriate furnishings for a child this size - Shinki can’t be more than a year younger than Lee’s son. 

Kankuro follows at his heels. “Okay, oryx in the room - where’d the kid come from?” 

Gaara lays Shinki down on Metal’s empty bed, shuffling the heavy weighted blanket to the side and replacing it with a plush comforter from the wardrobe. He’d like to at least change the boy’s clothes - he’ll have laundry to do later, with all the sand now falling to the sheets from the boy’s soiled garments - but he doesn’t want to wake him. Gaara’s more than familiar with the bone-deep ache of chakra exhaustion, and the boy was likely terrified besides. 

“He was alone in the storm,” he murmurs, studying the boy’s slumbering form. Shinki mumbles in his sleep and one of his small, white-knuckled fists comes to clench in front of his mouth. 

“Where’s his parents?”

Gaara levels Kankuro with a heavy gaze. “I have a mission for you.” 

Kankuro rolls his eyes. 

“Won’t it be easier for you to do it? With the sand an’ all? Especially in a sandstorm.” 

Gaara shifts his shoulders - he had almost forgotten his injuries, but they spark with pain anew now that the boy is no longer heavy in his arms. 

Kankuro’s eyes flick to Gaara’s shirt. His face pales behind his paint. 

“Holy fuck, are you bleeding?”

“Language.”

“Sorry, holy _flip_, are you bleeding? What the h-_heck_ happened out there?”

“He has Magnet Release.” Gaara feels his lips purse with the words. That will be an entirely separate mystery to unravel. “I need to stay here in case he awakes. I’m the only one who will be able to control him.”

As if summoned, a haze of the black sand roils up from the collar of Shinki’s cloak and clouds around his face.

Kankuro barely suppresses a harsh intake of breath. 

Shinki whimpers and rolls. His thumb finds its way into his mouth, his tiny eyebrows crumpled to the center of his forehead. Gaara recognizes the signs of a nightmare all too well. The boy is going to get dirt in his mouth. The least he can do is wipe his face, even if he can’t wake him just now and tell him it will be all right. 

“Get me a wet washcloth,” he orders Kankuro, eyes not straying from the boy’s face. 

Gaara sits on the edge of the bed and rests what he hopes is a comforting hand on the boy’s shoulder. Shinki doesn’t stir, but his face relaxes minutely. The Iron Sand slips between Gaara’s fingers, sending prickles of magnetic energy up Gaara’s forearm. 

Kankuro returns in a moment with a damp rag, and Gaara gently wipes the worst of the dirt from the boy’s face. Flecks of paint come away on the terrycloth in waxy peels, blood-red against sandy brown. 

“Ah- is that _puppeteer_ paint?” Kankuro asks from over Gaara’s shoulder. 

“Yes, do you recognize him?”

“Mm-no, but there’s only a handful of shinobi in the corps that have kids that age. Soon as the storm clears, I’ll go looking.” 

“Thank you,” Gaara mutters, his fingers brushing a lock of salt-crusted hair from Shinki’s now-damp forehead.

Outside, the wind howls.  


* * *

  
The door slams shut with a force that shakes the house to its floorboards when Kankuro returns.

The storm has been quieted for hours now, just tiny dust-devils whirling their way through the streets and out into the vast plateau that surrounds the village, but Shinki still hasn’t awoken. 

Nor has Gaara moved from his post at his bedside, watching alertly whenever the boy’s lip wobbles or his eyelids flicker in his continuous nightmare.

Kankuro eases the bedroom door open and meets Gaara’s eyes. Gaara tilts his chin, a silent question.

Kankuro shakes his head. His shoulders fall. 

The boy’s parents are dead.

In the dark, pessimistic corners of his mind, this is something Gaara already knew, and just needed his brother to confirm. The blood he still smells on the haze of sand surrounding Shinki’s face is not the boy’s own. 

The problem spirals, becomes all the more complex. 

Kankuro quietly pulls out the child-sized chair from Metal’s desk and sits backwards on it. 

“Mom was on my anti-terrorism squad, dad was just a civilian,” he says lowly, careful not to disturb the still-sleeping child. “Nothing left in their house but bloodstains and massive gouges from that sand of his. All the windows were blown out. One of the walls, too. He must have just manifested that power.”

“Fear is a powerful motivator,” Gaara murmurs, his hand stilling in the boy’s hair. “And children are often afraid of sandstorms.”

Kankuro sighs and runs a hand backwards through his dusty hair. His hood falls back to his shoulders. “It’s a shame,” he says flatly. His eyes are dry, but his lip quivers when he speaks. “She was a good soldier.”

Kankuro sags over the low back of the little chair, eyes locked on the figure on the bed.

“So, what do we do now?”  


* * *

  
The ringing of the telephone in his ear is the loudest thing in the house in hours, jarring. Gaara curls the cord around his fingers in an idle, nervous gesture. He’s loath to be away from Metal’s bedroom, not while Shinki still sleeps within, but time is of the essence. 

“Gaara?” Lee’s voice on the other end of the line sounds astonished, but it hits Gaara’s ear like a balm. It’s been far too long since he heard Lee’s voice. His surprise is to be expected. Gaara is functionally a Luddite, uncomfortable with the new technology of telephones and email when a simple messenger hawk typically suits his needs. “Is everything all right?”

“How soon can you be in Suna?” Gaara asks, instead of bothering to explain. The topic is too large and thorny to work through on the slim margin of the telephone line anyway. 

“A day and a half if I push myself!” Lee pauses, and Gaara can almost see the furrow forming between his thick eyebrows. “Wait, why-?”

“How soon _without_ having to be hospitalized when you get here?” Gaara cuts him off.

Lee hums. 

“Two days?”

“With Metal,” Gaara prompts. He huffs a tiny exhalation through his nose. “I’ll need you to stay for a while.”

“Oh, well- you know he’s very young still, Gaara,” Lee says, voice picking up steam the way it often does when he is about to launch into one of his impassioned speeches on the wonders of child development. “He’s not nearly quick enough to keep up with me, yet. I would need to carry him most of the way! That might add an extra half a day to the trip!”

_Young_. Gaara’s mind flashes over the image of that tiny body in the sandstorm, those small, hardened eyes, florid with anger and cold with terror. 

“I know,” he says quietly.

“How long are you thinking it will be?” Lee says, and Gaara can hear the scratching in the background that means one of Lee’s many notebooks has made it into his hands. He’s likely sorting through his day planner, which he keeps overstuffed with his and his son’s busy social, mission, and training calendar. “Metal has chakra therapy with Gai-sensei and Ningame on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and his playdates with Shikadai and Inojin the rest of the week - we would need to reschedule.” There’s a puff of breath - Lee licking his pen nib - and the sound of pages rustling as they turn. “And I’ll need to arrange a substitute for my team.” 

Gaara snorts, and the tension in his shoulders eases just a bit at Lee’s comforting prattle. Lee is always reminding him of things he already knows, as if he weren’t aware of Metal’s intensive therapy needs. The family genes are strong in Lee’s son, genjutsu and ninjutsu not coming to him at all naturally, and Lee and his teacher (and his teacher’s multitudinous hard-shelled summons) dedicate hours per week to gently helping Metal stimulate his own chakra pathways,. They’re hoping to ease him into his abilities, so he won’t burn through his chakra network entirely - unlike Lee had as a child, when his family tried to brutalize him out of his disability. 

A small, sad smile quirks the corner of Gaara’s lips, his heart warming. Lee is such a good, attentive father. Which is exactly why he needs him here, now. 

“At least a few weeks,” Gaara says. “Maybe longer. I’ll send a message to the Hokage explaining the circumstances.”

“Are you going to explain them to _me_?” Lee asks, and even through the smile in his voice, Gaara can hear the undertones of concern. 

Gaara sighs. From the doorway to Metal’s room, he hears the metallic rustling of sand.

“I will,” he says. “Just- it’s complicated. I’ll explain when you get here.”

“Okay,” Lee says softly, voice gentle in a way that makes Gaara’s heart trip over itself. “I trust you. We’ll be there as soon as we can.” 

“Thank you,” Gaara whispers, standing and peering into the hallway. The Iron Sand has fallen quiet again. 

“Any time,” Lee brushes him off. “You know I love you.” 

“I love you, too.” 

He sets the phone in its cradle with a quiet clatter and steps into the hall. 

Kankuro is just stepping out of his own room, hand rubbing the back of his neck. His face is blotchy, eyes red-rimmed beneath his purple paint. 

“Sent a rush hawk to the Nara compound,” he says gruffly, the roughness of his voice deliberately obscuring the rawness of his recent tears. “‘Mari should be here within the week.”

Gaara nods, eyes still fixed on the door at the end of the hallway where Shinki sleeps. 

“So,” Kankuro drawls, hands coming to rest on his hips in an imitation of confidence. “Magnet Release, huh? How d’you reckon his family ended up with _that_ in their veins?”

Gaara purses his lips. Distaste curls sour in the back of his throat. “It’s best not to think on it.”

“You don’t think dad- ”

Gaara’s nostrils flare without his permission. He carefully schools his face back to neutrality, keeping his voice level as he says, “There is little I would put past the man, keeping a mistress least of all.”

Kankuro’s upper lip curls in a sneer.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” He heaves an overwrought sigh. “Well, at least we can keep the kid from killing himself until the experts get here.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I bet y'all thought I had forgotten this fic, huh? I've been working on it all along, but it's been slow going! Hoping to have a steadier update schedule for this and my other WIP in the new year. 
> 
> Warning this chapter for a brief mention of animal death, and of course childhood trauma remains a theme throughout this story.

Gaara wakes up to Kankuro screaming. 

It’s strange, he has time to think as his sand propels him down the hall, how time seems to dilate in moments of panic. There’s a smear of ink all the way down the arm of his nightshirt; he fell asleep on his desk before his last scroll had a chance to dry. He finds himself fixated on it, the shape of it shrinking and stretching in his vision, as he careens around the corner towards Metal’s room. 

The room is half-full of Iron Sand. 

Kankuro is braced against the doorway, holding himself in place with his chakra threads. His face is pale and panicked, dirty marks of unwashed-off paint in the creases of his eyelids. The ankle of his jumpsuit is torn. 

“He’s gonna fucking kill us,” Kankuro shouts. 

Gaara signals for him to be silent, a single gesture in Shinobi Sign Language that means a harsher version of _’hush’_. 

Gaara can’t see Shinki at first, until finally he identifies his hunched, tiny form in the corner behind the wardrobe. His eyes are shut tight, hands clasped over his ears. Shreds of paper float on the surface of that rolling, ink-blank sea, pages torn from Metal’s childhood books. The glass covering the photo on the windowsill has cracked, and the frame hangs crooked. 

Gaara has no choice but to wade in. 

He doesn’t think to equip his sand armor until he’s waist-deep in the turmoil, and by then it’s too late. The Iron Sand is skin-close on all sides. It crawls like a living creature down the back of his neck, grabs his ankles and shakes him. 

It unsettles him, but he’s been more frightened before. At least this sand doesn’t come with the scream of a demon in his ears, howling every awful thing he’s ever done. He’s seen worse. He’s _done_ worse, and that means he knows that at the very center of all of this chaos is a white-cold kernel of fear. 

He plows on. 

There is a _crack_, and the ceramic turtle piggy bank, a gift from Lee’s incorrigible teacher, shatters. A few tarnished _ryo_ shake loose into the churning black sea and submerge. The ceramic is ground to dust in an instant. 

The sand grabs his waist, squeezes him as he walks closer. Every step seems to take an age. Over the creaking of the armoire being unseated from its moorings, he can hear Shiki’s high, panting breaths. 

He’s barely a meter away now, one outstretched arm’s distance from the terrified little boy. He reaches out. 

The sand lashes up and grabs him. It digs into his arm. Staring down at it, Gaara thinks of Lee. Did he have a moment in which his vision crystallized, where he could ponder how badly this would hurt? The sand is rough, the skin of his arm stinging, but it’s just … _squeezing_, not crushing. At his waist, Gaara’s gourd is curiously still. 

_He’s trying to control it._

“What the hell are you doing?” Kankuro yells from the door. “Kid, calm down!” 

Shinki only wails harder. 

Gaara glares his brother into silence. There’s only one thing for it. In a panic like this, nothing will drown out the noise in the boy’s head. The only solution is to cut under it, hope a tributary of calm reaches him. 

“Shinki,” he says, keeping his voice low, belying the simmer of panic churning in his gut. “Look at me.” 

Shinki freezes; his shoulders jolt. Even at this distance, Gaara can see the way the entirety of his tiny body is trembling. 

“I’m right here,” Gaara says. 

Slowly, as if by great effort, Shinki’s hands slide down the sides of his face. His eyes are rimmed red from more than just paint, his face pale. He squints open his eyes. Gaara has no idea if Shinki is really _seeing_ him, his eyes darting all over, pupils so dilated the whole iris looks black. 

“I want to help you,” Gaara says, as quietly as he can manage while still being heard over the roar of sand. He goes to take one step forward, but the Iron Sand holds his ankles fast. A clawed hand of iron shavings rises up and grabs for him. Shinki whimpers and recoils, his back against the far wall of the room. 

Above him, there’s a drawing tacked to the wall. A picture Metal drew when he was just three years old. The crayon marks hardly look like people at all, all bulbous heads and noodle limbs, but there are three distinct figures there: two tall, one small. Beneath, in Lee’s tidy script, they’ve been labeled: _Papa_, _Metal_, … and _Gaara_. 

Gaara releases a massive _pulse_ of chakra from his hands, and the whole room falls still. The Iron Sand glimmers like the placid surface of a lake. 

“You couldn’t have done that first?” Kankuro whispers from the doorway. Gaara doesn’t respond. He didn’t think of it; he saw Shinki’s terror and it was like his body moved before he could think. 

Shinki’s blinking up at him now, his eyes wet but slowly clearing. He’s searching Gaara’s face, his tiny eyebrows drawn but his expression no longer afraid. 

“Who are you?” His voice comes out high and wavering. As he speaks, the dark mass coalesces and draws tight around him, like the ragged wings of a massive crow. 

Gaara kneels down. His hand is still reaching, and the Iron Sand hasn’t released it yet, a tether connecting him to the boy in front of him. 

“My name is Gaara,” he tells him. “And behind me is my brother Kankuro. We’re here to help you.”

“How did you do that?” The conversation jumps topics as quickly as a body plummeting from a cliff. A sea change happens on the boy’s face; the fear is gone and in its place is an inquisitive blankness. The sand tugs at Gaara’s wrist, but it now feels less like terrified rage and more like … curiosity. Almost playfulness. Gaara struggles to catch up. 

“I used my chakra. You can do it, too.” Gaara lifts his other hand and presses it to the Iron Sand still holding him. It shivers and breaks away, rustling back to gather around Shinki’s shoulders. “I’ll show you later, but right now it’s time to sleep.” He chances a look at the clock on the nightstand, miraculously not broken. Its glowing face tells him it’s near three A.M. “It’s late.” 

“Oh.” A yawn stretches Shinki’s mouth wide. The crust of tears under his eyes looks almost painful as he rubs at them with balled fists. “I’m sleepy.”

“Me too, kid,” Kankuro calls. 

Shinki’s gaze snaps over to him, and his eyes go wide. “You hurt your ankle,” he says. When Gaara looks over his shoulder, there’s a thin trail of blood trickling down the side of Kankuro’s leg, a spreading stain on the white of his sock. “You need to tell your mom to put a bandage on it.”

Kankuro’s mouth drops open. “I- ” He looks at Gaara, a bit desperately. 

Gaara has only the slightest hint of how to guide him. _’Don’t lie,’_ he signs. 

“I’ll … I’ll take care of it myself.” Kankuro jabs a thumb at his chest. “You don’t have to worry about me, kid. Us puppeteers are tough stuff!” 

Gaara winces as the words register on Shinki’s face. 

“Puppeteers?” he echoes. A thin line forms between his eyebrows. But then he nods, his expression closed-off and serious. He looks much older than his true age, an adult’s face on a child’s body. 

Kankuro’s shoulders sag with relief as Shinki turns back to Gaara. 

Some instinct Gaara didn’t know he had tells him a change of subject is in order. 

“Can you stand?” he asks Shinki. “Are you hurt?”

Shinki shakes his head. His arms are crossed over his bird-boned chest now. The posture is achingly familiar. He looks over Gaara’s shoulder to the bed, where the covers are tangled and strewn onto the floor, then to the shredded paper littering the floorboards, the chips of glass from picture frames and the places the sand left gouges in the stucco. His mouth drops into an ‘o’. 

“I made a mess,” he says, and his voice is so quiet that Gaara has to lean forward to hear. His lower lip wobbles. Where the mention of his mother’s profession hadn’t seemed to phase him at all, the notion of having torn up the room seems to place him squarely on the edge of a tantrum. “I’m sorry.”

“We’ll clean it up in the morning,” Gaara dismisses the concern brusquely. He holds out his hand for Shinki to take. Slowly, from amid the cloud of iron, a tiny, pale hand reaches for him. 

“You’re not mad at me?”

Gaara pulls Shinki to his feet as he stands. The joints in his knees crack with the effort. Lee is going to be furious he hasn’t been keeping up with his Tai Chi. 

“No,” Gaara says plainly. “You didn’t do it on purpose, and you’ll put it right later on.” 

He feels Shinki’s grip relax fractionally in his own as he walks him to the bed. Shinki waits patiently on the mattress while Gaara shakes all the sand from the sheets and banishes it to the outdoors, though the roiling mass around Shinki’s shoulders and neck remains like a shroud. 

Gaara pulls the blankets up over him and bends down. A moment later, he stops himself. He had been about to kiss the boy’s forehead, the way he kisses Metal’s when he puts him to bed. Something that would have been utterly inappropriate from a stopgap caregiver. 

He stands, brushing dust that isn’t there from the front of his sleep clothes. 

“Goodnight,” he says, and Shinki and Kankuro echo him. Then he turns to leave the room. 

“Gaara?” a small voice calls as he reaches for the lightswitch, halfway out the door. “Can you leave the light on?”

Gaara knows all about fear of the dark, every small terror that can magnify itself in shadow, how much louder the mind can get when the eyes can’t drown it out. 

“Of course,” he says, and lets his hand fall from the switch. 

He closes the door behind him with a hush. 

“Are you sure that’s good for him?” Kankuro asks, once they’re standing in the hall. “Isn’t it bad for your, like, arcadium rhythms to sleep with the lights on?”

Gaara is staring at his arm where the Iron Sand grabbed it. His arm is rubbed raw, skin abraded all over but not bleeding. 

“Circadian,” he says absently, and he hears rather than sees Kankuro rolling his eyes beside him as they begin to walk down the hall to their respective rooms. “And he barely has any chakra left right now. He’ll sleep just fine.” _As long as no more nightmares wake him up,_ he doesn’t add.

“Seriously, man.” Kankuro shakes out the torn leg of his jumpsuit and a number of iron shavings fall to the floor. Gaara flicks his fingers and they slip through a crack in the window and away. “That kid’s gonna be a terror when he gets a little older.”

  


* * *

  


Shinki sleeps for two days. 

After twenty-four hours, one of the medi-nin, a bony-shouldered chuunin, comes from the hospital to check him out. Gaara breaks away from the pile of paperwork he’s had his assistant bring to his home office in order to meet her in the boy’s room. 

“He’s fine,” she says, the veil of her headwrap falling to dangle over the fractalized scar that covers the left side of her face. Gaara recognizes it as the legacy of a lightning-style jutsu—he has a similar mark just below his collarbone, where Sasuke Uchiha struck him during their chuunin exams all those years ago. “He’s only chakra exhausted,” she continues. “It’s not life threatening. He just needs to rest.” She grins, and the shiny left side of her mouth stretches with tight skin. “I’m sure you’ll take excellent care of him, Kazekage-sama.”

Gaara doesn’t let his discomfort at her words show on his face. The girl is young. Too young to remember his reign of terror over the village. She has only ever known him as Suna’s revered, reserved Kazekage. The lack of fear shows in the glimmer of her lone uncovered brown eye as she bows her head in deference. 

“I’ll come check on him again tomorrow,” she says, and glances to where Kankuro hovers nervously in the doorway of Metal’s room. “But don’t be surprised if he’s still asleep then. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” 

Her slight frame ducks under Kankuro’s arm resting high on the door frame. There’s a distant clatter as she shuts the front door behind her. 

Kankuro and Gaara look at each other for a long moment. Then, Kankuro chuckles, ignoring the warning glare Gaara shoots in his direction. 

“She just said he won’t wake up for a while,” Kankuro whispers, hands raised defensively against the spear point of Gaara’s icy stare. “But you look like you just saw a ghost, little brother.”

In the back of his mind, Gaara hears the sobbing of an abandoned six-year-old, crouched over his third victim. He shakes his head slowly, until the sound fades to the steady, tinnitic ringing that dominates his ears, hearing damaged from the roar of sand too close to his head. 

“No ghosts,” he says quietly, long after Kankuro has left the room and the steady hum of his drill permeates up through the floorboards from his workshop. “Just me.”

  


* * *

  


“Can I play with the puppets, Papa?”

Gaara hears Lee and Metal before he sees them, coming up the tunnel that leads to the back entrance of the Kazekage manor. It’s just two-and-a-half days since their phone call, and far too late into the night. 

“Kazekage-sama—” One of his ANBU materializes on the windowsill of his study, one hand on the tanto hanging at her hip. 

“I’m aware,” he cuts her off, standing and shouldering on the heavy cloak that hangs from the back of his chair. A tiny curl of sand travels up from his gourd and deadens the wick of the oil lamp on his desk with a hiss and a spiral of thin smoke. “Dismissed.” 

There’s a flicker, and then nobody remains there but Gaara and the voices echoing up from the back of the house. 

“Now, Metal, we’ve talked about this. The puppets are weapons, not toys. Just like a kunai or a shuriken: they’re to use, not to play with.” 

There’s a mighty cracking sound behind Gaara’s shoulders, and he turns, one pale eyebrow arched, to regard Kankuro stretching in the doorway of the study, expression wrinkled at the noise his back just made. He’s still in his daytime jumpsuit, the black hood draped around his shoulders and two smears of purple paint down his cheeks. There’s a speckled pattern of indentations on his forehead that Gaara is almost certain came from a piece of sandpaper. He must have fallen asleep on his worktable again. 

“Hey, mini-Lee,” Kankuro calls past Gaara’s face and out the open window. “You wanna come up and play with some puppets?”

“Uncle Kankuro!” Metal’s cheerful cry cuts through the black of the cold night air. There’s a rustling noise and the soft _thud_ of a child’s body jumping to the sandy earth, then the rush of tiny footsteps clamoring up the rough stone passageway. 

Gaara lets the sand engulf him and Kankuro both to meet them outside the door. The tunnel lets out just a few meters from the back door, well hidden among a copse of jagged stone. 

“Oof.” Gaara hears Kankuro’s grunt, the grin audible through his exhalation, as the rush of sand falls away. “You’re gettin’ too strong for me, kiddo. What’s that dad of yours been feedin’ ya?”

“Lots of whole grains and lean proteins!” 

The glare of the lantern light clears from Gaara’s eyes in enough time for him to see Kankuro gingerly prying Metal’s arms from around his waist, just before two green blurs tackle him from either side. He’s knocked first left, then right. The air being forced from his diaphragm can find no purchase beneath his ribs as he’s squeezed at two different heights.

“Gaara!” Metal is yelling into the thick fabric of his cloak, voice only slightly muffled. 

Gaara watches as, across the back courtyard, a family of narrow-eyed foxes stick their heads up anxiously from their dens and then, acknowledging the din, duck just as quickly back down again. He’ll have to set out some leftover carcasses for them later—it’s taken months for them to be willing to approach the house proper, and Gaara has felt a tender space in what he assumes is his heart for them ever since he found one of the kit’s corpses being picked apart by a hawk in the springtime. 

Temari says they’re pests, and they intimidate the local farmers, always going after chickens in the hottest part of summer, when even the beetles have dried out and died off. The pragmatic part of Gaara agrees with her, but there’s a part of him that ached when he heard the mother fox’s wounded cry in the middle of the daytime, watched her bared teeth as she snarled the hawk away from her kit’s body, even though there was nothing to be done. That part of him saves the cooking scraps in a closed-lid tin under the kitchen sink and sneaks out after Kankuro has gone to bed to leave them by the entrance to their den. He used to have his sand do it, standing with arms crossed at the back door, scared the blood-soaked scent of him would send them cowering, but in the past month they’ve edged ever-closer to the door. 

Three nights ago, the fattest of the kits gamboled over his bare foot to play-wrestle with its brothers. Its fur had been soft, unexpectedly warm. 

Gaara tries not to keep a routine with them. He doesn’t want them to become reliant on him—not when animal self-sufficiency is so important to their long-term survival (not when he could die any day and leave them behind and wanting)—but even so, that small, soft part of him aches at their easy allegiance. Even now, few non-human mammals _don’t_ fear him. Animals are much wiser than humans, Gaara has found, or at least they haven’t dulled down their instincts of self-preservation out of politeness or duty. 

And anyway, feeding the kits keeps them out of the chicken coops. 

“I did my first jutsu, did Papa tell you?” Metal’s high-pitched, rapid-fire prattle brings him back, following him through the back door and into the house proper. 

As if Lee could keep from sharing something like that the moment it happened. Gaara has the letter spelling out the event in exacting detail upstairs in his desk, all five pages of it. He probably knows more about Metal’s first _henge_ than the people who were actually there. 

“I did, but I’d like to hear you tell me about it.” 

Absently, he realizes his fingers have found the top of Metal’s head and are idly tousling the strands of his fine hair. Although it’s styled just the same as Lee’s, the texture is utterly different—thin and prone to frizz or stringiness, depending on how dry or wet it is outside. Lee has spent a great many hours dithering over hair care products to make his son’s hair lie flat. A waste of time for a five-year-old, if you ask Gaara (which Lee hasn’t, but Gaara has told him anyway). 

Lee pulls back, now, though his hand still rests on Gaara’s waist. He meets Gaara’s eye with an expression that says, _We need to talk._

Gaara nods fractionally, just a slight movement of his chin, not enough to be seen by the pair of adoring dark eyes staring up at him.

“But,” he adds, “it will have to be later. Tomorrow. After you’ve had some sleep.” 

“Metal,” Lee cuts in, “it’s time to get ready for bed. Why don’t you go to your room and- ”

“No,” Gaara interjects.

“No?”

Kankuro stoops down then, into Metal’s eyeline, interrupting the disappointed crumple of his lower lip and the confused furrow between Lee’s brows. 

“Hey, how ‘bout you come with me instead? We’ll get ya cleaned up. I bet you’re all sandy from the desert, right?” 

Metal nods and pulls out his scarf. A handful of sand drops to the floor of the hallway. 

“Metal!” Lee gasps. “Don’t make a mess!” 

Gaara lays a hand on Lee’s arm, rolling his eyes. With a wave of his hand, the sand shuffles back under the door through whence it came. Kankuro chuckles, and Lee’s disgruntled grumbling brings a half-smile to his face. 

“Just because we’re at Gaara’s house doesn’t mean you can forget your manners,” Lee reminds his son. 

Metal looks up at him and nods, his expression suddenly very serious. “I’m sorry, Papa.” 

Gaara tugs at the back of the arm of Lee’s jumpsuit. The fabric is starting to wear thin there around the elbow, the elastic losing its slack. “Please,” he says, “this is your home and Metal’s, too.”

“Yeah,” Kankuro chimes, “a little sand never killed anyone! Or, well- ” He blanches. “It’s been a long time since it’s killed anyone, that is.” 

There’s a beat of silence where Metal opens his mouth, looking ready to ask a question that none of them are quite prepared to answer so late at night, when Kankuro interjects. 

“Anyway, c’mon, kiddo. Let’s go get you a wash and get some jammies on you, and then we can have a midnight snack.” He offers Metal his hand, and Metal takes it. Kankuro staggers as he goes to stand. “Ack! This guy!” he yells in a hushed voice, swaying theatrically and shaking his hand out, an exaggerated wince on his face. “You’re gonna break my hand one of these days!” 

Metal looks up at Kankuro, his eyes wide, and tells him, “I would _never_ break your hand, Uncle Kankuro. A good shinobi always protects his most important people.”

Kankuro’s face goes suddenly slack, his expression soft. “I know, kid,” he tells him, starting to walk Metal down the hall. Gaara watches them go.

“Uncle Kankuro,” Metal says, halfway down the hall, the very epitome of patience, “my room is that way.”

“I know, I know,” Kankuro brushes him off. “But Gaara moved some of your clothes over to my workshop for a little bit. Plus, I’ve got all the best snacks there. All Gaara keeps in the kitchen is vegetables.” Kankuro makes a comic expression of disgust. “Yuck.”

“Even though vegetables might taste bitter, they make you strong and fast for taijutsu!” Metal recites, inflecting the words exactly as his father would.

“Oh? Is that what your Papa says?” Kankuro jibes. “Well, jerky and candy make you great at puppeteering, did he ever tell you that?” 

“They do?” Metal’s little eyes go wide with awe. 

“He has dried fruit in his backpack!” Lee calls at their retreating backs. “Don’t let him fill up on junk or he’ll be up all night!” 

Kankuro staidly ignores him, hand on Metal’s shoulder. “Say, how about this. You can pick where you want to sleep tonight—any room in the whole house!—and I’ll set it up for you. It’ll be just like a slumber party.”

“Any room?” Metal breathes.

“Any room.”

“Uncle Kankuro’s workshop!” Metal squeals. 

“Any room but Uncle Kankuro’s workshop!” Lee’s panicked cry comes out more like a groan, stifled between tight lips. His hand shoots out as if to grab at the two of them, but they’re much too far down the hallway, and his clasped fist drops to his side empty. “It’s not safe in there!”

Metal turns around to regard his father, almost to the end of the hall now. “But that’s where Uncle Kankuro sleeps.”

“Uncle Kankuro is an adult—” Lee begins, halfway into full lecture mode.

“Trust me,” Kankuro interrupts smoothly, grabbing Metal’s shoulders and dropping to a crouch in front of him, expression suddenly intent, “you don’t want to sleep in there. You know why?”

“Why?” Metal whispers, as if he’s about to receive some knowledge of great importance.

“It’s full of my farts.” 

Metal scrunches up his face and makes a sound that’s half-laugh, half-disgusted wail. Kankuro starts giggling along with him, ever tickled by his own childish brand of humor. 

Lee’s face has gone red, a scowl on his lips. He hates when Kankuro uses crass humor, even moreso around Metal. 

“Be careful with the puppets, please!” he calls. “Metal, no touching the poison ones!” 

Kankuro just waves him off. “Don’t sweat it.” He leans over and winks over Metal’s shoulder. “I’m, like, 90% sure I locked those ones up. Or at least most of them.” 

Lee’s face goes incandescent with frustration and he starts to sputter, but Gaara takes his hand and squeezes it, drawing his attention. 

“He’ll be fine,” Gaara murmurs, edging closer to Lee’s warmth. They’re far from the heating, here in the bowels of the house, and the icy cold of the desert night is still sneaking in under the doorframe nearby. “He’s very responsible. Metal, I mean,” he amends hastily. “Not Kankuro.” 

Lee looks down at him and grins, then his hand falls heavy on Gaara’s shoulder as Metal and Kankuro disappear around the corner. 

“Can we talk?”

  


* * *

  


They move to the kitchen, so Gaara can make Lee a pot of that thick black sludge he calls coffee. Lee may act like he’s indefatigable, but he’s nearly dead on his feet right now, almost swaying with exhaustion. With Metal as his sole responsibility in the middle of the desert, Gaara doubts Lee slept at all the past two nights. And for them to arrive so quickly, it’s unlikely Lee set Metal down for long; he probably shouldered his child’s weight most of the journey from Konoha. 

While Gaara busies himself with the copper coffee pot, Lee comes up beside him. He tenderly brushes aside the unbrushed hair on Gaara’s forehead, presses a kiss to the scar there. 

“I missed you,” he whispers.

Gaara leans into the touch. Everything feels incredibly peaceful and still. It’s easy to forget his troubles in this moment, with the water slowly bubbling on the stove before him, the faint clatter of Metal and Kankuro ‘getting ready for bed’ in Kankuro’s downstairs workshop, the comforting weight of Lee beside him, shoring him up. It’s easy to forget the hurt, frightened child sleeping just down the hall, burdened with a power he can’t yet control. It’s easy to forget the thorny, untenable situation he’s ensnared himself in, with a single impulsive gesture in the middle of a storm. 

Where Gaara has felt moorless the past several days, Lee anchors him. 

“So,” Lee says, “are you going to tell me why we needed to get here so quickly?”

“I told you not to strain yourself.” Gaara reaches for the mugs hanging on their hooks behind the stove, the ones he only uses when Lee visits. He pulls down the one with the hand-painted cactus design, fills it with coffee, and passes it to Lee. After a moment’s consideration, he pulls down his mug, too, the one with the lotus design, and fills it as well. 

Lee waits patiently for Gaara to stop deflecting. He stands with his hands clasped around his mug, back to the kitchen counter, while Gaara adds two spoonfuls of sugar to his cup, takes a sip, grimaces, and adds two more spoonfuls. Lee is so tranquil, almost monklike in his patience, while he waits for Gaara to formulate the words. He just stands there, in Gaara’s kitchen—in the kitchen Gaara _wants_ to be theirs, the space Gaara wishes he hadn’t just been reminded isn’t quite Lee’s at all—taking slow sips of hot coffee without even blowing on the surface. 

Gaara’s mind is a racing blur, the way his vision goes when he flies too fast on a platform of sand or when he falls from a height. His stomach feels uneasy, the thick coffee not helping, and he recognizes the emotion, after some thought, as nervousness. 

Squaring his shoulders, he takes a long, steadying breath, then sets his half-full mug down on the counter with a _clunk_. Lee eyes him with anticipation, setting his own empty mug down much more loudly. 

“I’ll show you.”

  


* * *

  


Everything is quiet in the hallway leading to Metal’s room. There’s no crashing of Iron Sand, no cracking of glass or creaking of wood. But Gaara can feel the disquiet in Shinki’s chakra all the same, bubbling just under the surface of the midnight stillness, like a pan waiting to boil over. 

“Metal’s room?” Lee whispers. Lee can’t sense chakra, so he has no way of knowing what waits for them at the end of the hall.

Gaara hushes him with a single gesture across his lips. He cracks the door and waits for Lee’s all-too-human eyes to adjust from the dark of the hallway to the light within the room. Gaara’s first impression is of chaos; though he picked up the scattered paper, the wood shavings, and the layer of grit on the floor, the room is still in disarray. There’s a gouge in the paint by the door, right at Kankuro’s head height, that Gaara hadn’t noticed in the few times he’s been in the room since that night. 

He feels Lee’s indrawn breath on the back of his neck, Lee trying against his nature to stay quiet. Shinki is mostly concealed in the pile of blankets heaped on the bed, but his pale face sticks out from the dark mass, wan with such pallor that it seems to glow even in the low light. As they watch, his expression crumples, and the Iron Sand creeps out from the blankets to surround his face, pointed like daggers. It forms half-human figures and shapes of indiscernible provenance as it rises and falls on the bedsheet, a mono-color tableau that plays out in fast-forward. The shapes coalesce and disappear before they can be properly registered or understood, the sand teeming and writhing. Gaara, at least, recognizes them for what they are: Shinki’s nightmares played out in his sand. 

Lee’s hand tightens on Gaara’s shoulder.

“Who is he?” he whispers, and Gaara only knows Lee spoke by the flutter of the hair that falls in front of his ear, Lee’s mouth pressed close to his face. 

He guides Lee back out into the hallway without a further word. 

Neither of them speak again until they’re back in the comforting glow of the kitchen, yellow-gold with the warm lamplight shining overhead. 

Gaara opens his mouth, and Lee holds up a hand to pause him. He pours himself another cup of coffee, full almost to the brim of the mug, and swallows half of it down in a single long pull. He exhales heavily when he sets the mug down; then, he braces himself against the counter. 

“Okay,” he says. “Start from the beginning.”

  


* * *

  


By the time Gaara has finished the story, Lee’s face is drawn tight, his whole expression turned inwards and thoughtful. 

“So,” Lee says finally, after a long moment of silence between them. Through the floor, Gaara hears Metal’s giggle, the crash of wood on wood, Kankuro’s muffled shout of mock distress. “What is the plan?” 

And this is exactly why Gaara needed Lee here, why he couldn’t imagine facing the insurmountable nature of this decision without him. Lee trusts Gaara implicitly, unwaveringly. He has the utmost faith that, whatever decision Gaara might make, it will be the right one. Lee’s trust is not the fawning sycophancy of the students at the Academy, nor the awe and regard of Gaara’s office staff, nor even the uneasy truce of the Council who over time have learned that Gaara will always put Suna first. Lee’s trust is the trust of one who has seen what Gaara is capable of at both his worst and his best, and who believes that Gaara will always follow the light side of his heart, even in times of darkness.

“He’ll stay here until I find someone else who can take him. A suitable foster parent. I don’t know what other choice there is. I’m the only one who can control his power … who can teach _him_ to control his own power.” 

Lee grins then, looking down into his coffee cup, a half-private, half-adoring thing.

“Metal will be glad for the playmate. He loves coming to visit you and Kankuro, but I think he misses his friends in Konoha.”

Gaara thins his lips. “There are many young students at the Academy who would adore the chance to play with Metal.”

Lee smiles, but without teeth. “I know, but he says they treat him differently. Because of his relationship with you … or because he’s from Konoha, I don’t know. He’s so shy, sometimes it’s hard to know if he’s letting his anxiety color his perception if I’m not there to see it. This is better. This will be like having a built-in friend, right in his very own home! And I can supervise them both while you’re working!” 

It’s hard for Gaara to imagine Shinki—with his dour expressions and dark thoughts and incredible power—getting along with a hesitant, sensitive child like Metal. It’s hard to imagine a child _like that_—a killer already at his young age—having any friends at all. 

He shrugs. Lee leans over then, crossing into the tight bubble of doubt Gaara has formed around himself, and pulls Gaara into a hug. It’s one of the places Gaara feels safest, wrapped in Lee’s strong arms, pressed to Lee’s broad chest. He sighs, sinking into Lee’s warmth. 

Lee rubs bandaged hands slowly and firmly up Gaara’s back, and the wrappings of his bandages catch at the edge of one of the scabs between Gaara’s shoulder blades. 

Gaara hisses in pain, wincing away from the touch. 

In barely a second, Lee has him spun around, cloak discarded to the floor and the thin fabric of his sleeping shirt rucked up. One of Lee’s fingers strokes along the edge of his wound.

“You let him hurt you?” 

Gaara shrugs the fingers away, turning and pulling the hem of his shirt down to cover himself, feeling exposed in the cold air of the kitchen. He crosses his arms over his chest. He feels his shirt getting stuck to the blood on his back, now running freely. 

“He was no threat to me.”

“Those aren’t bandaged, you could get an infection—”

“It’s fine. They’re healing.”

“Why didn’t the sand—?”

“What should I have done?” Gaara snaps, cutting off the concerned raise of Lee’s voice. “I couldn’t very well Sand Coffin him, could I?”

Lee raises his hands in a placating gesture, saying, “Now, you know I didn’t mean—”, but Gaara’s hackles are too raised to be calmed by it. 

“He was terrified. Alone. He’s just a child. Just because he killed them doesn’t mean he’s some sort of—”

“Who killed someone?” pipes a small voice from the kitchen door. “Papa, is someone in trouble? 

Gaara turns to see Metal, in pajamas and stocking feet, clutching a puppet half again as big as he is. He managed to approach undetected in the rising swell of Gaara’s emotions. Kankuro is standing behind him, eyes wide and staring back and forth between Gaara and Lee, his hands clapped over Metal’s ears. 

“Uncle Kankuro, let go of me,” Metal says, struggling out of Kankuro’s grip and approaching his father. “Papa, what happened? Did someone get killed?” His voice is rising, a steady tide of anxiety raising his pitch. “Was it the sand?”

Gaara opens his mouth to tell the truth, but Lee is already dropping to a crouch in front of his son, the defensive scowl on his face replaced with an easy, reassuring grin. He slips into the role of the doting parent like putting on a well-worn coat. He claps his hands on Metal’s shoulders and starts rubbing up and down, a gesture familiar to Gaara from Lee’s instructions: deep pressure, a technique for staving off Metal’s panic attacks. 

“Everything is just fine!” Lee booms in his most paternal tones. He sounds far too much like his teacher when he talks like this. “See? Everybody is right here, and we’re all happy and safe!”

Metal looks up at Gaara tremulously, a if to confirm the truth of his father’s words. His lower lip is trembling, tears building up in those dark eyes that look nothing at all like Lee’s. 

Gaara forces a tiny quirk of his lips, a baring of his teeth that passes for a smile on his worse days. 

Metal immediately seems to relax, turning his attention back to Lee with a smile, now holding up his puppet for show. Lee gives a muffled exclamation of awe. 

“Sorry,” Kankuro whispers, “I thought you two would be done by now.”

“We are,” Gaara replies, brushing past Kankuro to make for the door. “I have paperwork I need to finish,” he announces. It’s not a lie, but it’s not why he’s leaving either. 

Lee has already launched into a quiet pep talk from the tile floor; he’s better at that brand of reassurance anyway. 

“Lee, come find me when you’re done. Goodnight Metal, Kankuro.” 

“Goodnight, Gaara!” Metal chimes as he passes to the door. “Don’t forget to sleep—_oh!_”

Gaara pauses in his step, not yet turning around. 

“Your back is bleeding,” Metal tells him. 

Gaara closes his eyes. His cloak is still on the floor where Lee threw it, and his shirt is pale tan. 

“Papa says you should always put a bandage on right away, or you’ll get sick.” 

Gaara presses his lips together. Over his shoulder, he can hear Lee praising Metal on his retention of medical knowledge. 

“Thank you, Metal,” he says. “I’ll do that.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in posting this chapter. Other projects easily consume me. I wrote this instead of working on a shorter WIP, goodness knows why. 
> 
> **Warnings** this chapter for: referenced child abuse/child neglect including starvation, childhood trauma responses that include violent reactions and shutting down, references to institutional homophobia, implications of restrictive/overprotective parenting styles, cursing in front of children, a character having doubts about their suitability as a parent due to their own childhood abuse, various characters handling trauma triggers the best they can (which is not very well), and overall ninja parenting being kind of fucked up. I also want to add the disclaimer that not all traumatized children lash out with violence when upset or overwhelmed, but it is among the repertoire of possible responses, is aligned with Shinki's canon characterization, and is the direction I've chosen to go here. Traumatized people are not inherently violent or aggressive, and there are other characters in this story experiencing their own trauma responses that are more subtle.
> 
> This chapter has very mild spoilers for Gaara Hiden.

The next day dawns harsh, sharp beams of sunlight that crash across Gaara’s mostly sleepless face and stir him into a drowsy, half-pained wakefulness. His shoulders ache from the high back of the chair as he plows through his third cup of tea.

It’s just he and Lee now, submerged in the quiet of the morning. Gaara’s assistant will be by soon, no doubt, with tall stacks of paperwork threatening to topple her willowy frame. Kankuro’s still asleep—will be for hours, most likely— and Metal fled the kitchen the moment he cleared his plate to go try and wake his uncle. An effort that is almost certain to be futile, but an effort nonetheless.

Lee sets a gentle hand on Gaara’s wrist, just below where the sleeve of his jacket ends and the jut of bone begins. Gaara tightens his grip on his cup of weak tea. 

“About last night—” Lee starts to say. Then he looks up, and his eyes get very wide.

“Who are you, and why are you in Gaara’s house?” The voice is sharp, petulant.

Gaara turns. Shinki is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, apparently the preferred location for children to suddenly materialize these days. 

“Shinki,” he says. “You’re awake. Are you hungry?”

Shinki’s knuckles are white on the doorframe. Behind him, the Iron Sand writhes like a living creature, up over his shoulders and down in front of his chest, wreathing his head and neck in black. For all that it’s a threat display, he’s still so clearly a child. The green of his irises is stark against the bloodshot red of his eyes, and there’s the salt-white residue of a trail of dried spit across his cheek.

“Who is this guy?” Shinki turns the inquiry to Gaara when Lee appears at a loss for words. That’s unusual for Lee, but Gaara has little time to assess Lee’s emotional state, because Shinki is approaching the kitchen table at a rapid clip, Iron Sand buffeting him and forming into spikes over his shoulders. 

“This is Lee,” Gaara finds his voice. “Lee is my—” 

_Husband_, he doesn’t say, can’t say, because they aren’t—_can’t be_—while Gaara is still Kazekage. Temari’s marriage was controversial enough, and it was like pulling teeth from a chimaera’s jaw to even let her keep her Sunan citizenship. Not to speak of her son, whose paperwork is still in limbo even five years from his birth, such that he has not yet even been allowed to _visit_ Suna. It would be an impossibility for Gaara and Lee to wed with the council as they are. A Konoha citizen marrying the Kazekage? One with a child already, no less? And on top of that, a same-sex union, with no prospect of producing a proper, full-blooded Sunan heir? The notion is almost laughable in the face of the current council appointments. 

… Although, a few members of the council are in less-than-stellar health, and the next in line of their clans are far more open-minded. Gaara tries not to make a habit of wishing death on anyone these days, but in a few years … Well, it would certainly make things easier.

_Boyfriend_, he also doesn’t say, because it sounds so juvenile. It’s the word the Academy students use for their childhood crushes, the word Temari uses to tease her son about his female playmates: _Does she want you to be her boyfriend?_ It can’t possibly encompass all that Lee _is_ to Gaara, all that he _means_.

_Lover_ almost fits, but Lee hates the word. He long ago declared it inappropriate for young ears, banning its use in front of the children. 

“... partner,” Gaara settles on finally. 

Shinki’s reddened eyes narrow. He’s in desperate need of a bath; his hair sticks up every which way, his face a mess of lingering paint smears. There’s a distinct stink of sweat on him. 

He sticks his chin out. 

“Why do you need a partner, if you’re strong already?” 

This gives Gaara pause. He’s unused to such questions, the frank honesty of childhood, striking straight to the heart of the matter. The adults in his life never speak to him this way, too concerned with preserving his _feelings_. As if he has feelings worthy of his people’s consideration. Or—the more likely reason—terrified of his reaction. Even Temari, with her whip-sharp tongue, gentles when she speaks to him, and Kankuro couches all his criticisms in humor. Even Metal, for all his childlike guilelessness, knows better than to ask Gaara such questions unless he wants the cold, harsh truth. He much prefers his father’s reassurances; Lee has a way of putting a comforting spin on even the thorniest of topics. 

The only person who truly dares to challenge him like this is ... Lee, and even then only occasionally. Usually in the heat of an argument. Certainly not first thing in the morning. 

He’s been waiting too long to speak. He can feel Lee’s growing tension beside him, can see the rising discomfiture on Shinki’s dirty face. 

“Lee _is_ strong,” Gaara says, and he senses the minute relaxation of Lee’s shoulders. As if Gaara would have taken a child’s word and, after a moment’s consideration, would have decided he didn’t really need Lee after all. It’s enough to enrage him, how little Lee thinks of himself, still, after all these years. “Lee makes me stronger,” he adds, when Shinki’s expression doesn’t change at all. “All the things we love make us stronger. Having something—someone—to protect, that’s the greatest source of strength there is.” 

Shinki scowls, his face crumpling into a mask of incandescent rage in an instant. It would be almost sweet, his defensiveness—the way his tiny face distorts so suddenly, like a particularly furious fox kit—if it weren’t for the Iron Sand looming behind his tiny body, two arms stretched up in arcs. Like a bear before it attacks. 

He lashes out suddenly in Lee’s direction. 

Lee dodges easily with a grin, before Gaara or the sand can even think to react. The chair behind where he just stood shatters in the wake of the Iron Sand. 

“My!” Lee booms. “You certainly are strong! I cannot wait to see what you can do with a bit of training!”

Shinki’s expression is one of violent startlement. The Iron Sand surges, a great black tide behind him, and makes to lunge for Lee again. 

Gaara can’t let this continue. He drops to a knee, placing himself in Shinki’s eyeline. Right on his level. The sand in Gaara’s gourd doesn’t stir at the threat. Before him, the Iron Sand shrinks back. 

“This is my house,” he says. “No one will hurt anyone else here.” The words fall solemn and heavy from his mouth. Less command and more promise, because that’s what he means them to be. An oath. “Including you.” 

Then, sparing a thought for the splintered chair whose legs are now strewn across the floor, he adds, “And you won’t destroy any more of our things.” 

Shinki’s hackles fall, though the Iron Sand still bristles around him. He looks, all of a sudden, so tremendously _tired_. 

“If you’re feeling upset or frustrated, come find me and tell me.” Air is hard to come by. Cold anxiety works its metal talons in his chest. Gaara breathes in deep, solidifies it into the steel of determination. “I’ll help you.” 

Shinki eyes him with suspicion. His gaze tracks over to Lee. Without even looking, Gaara knows Lee’s beaming and giving a thumbs up. Then Shinki looks back to Gaara. 

He gives a tiny nod. “Okay.” 

Gaara nods back. Behind him, he can hear Lee starting to pick up the scrap wood that was once his kitchen chair. It’s a good thing that Gaara spent so much of his time as a genin on S-rank missions, and that his tastes tend more Spartan than extravagant, because he suspects that a few weeks with Shinki will entail replacing quite a lot of furniture. 

Their moment of solemn eye contact is interrupted by Kankuro entering the kitchen, scratching his stomach and stretching. 

“Oh, hey kiddo, you’re up!” He stoops to ruffle Shinki’s hair. Shinki hardly spares him a glance. Gaara notes with a little internal buzz of bewilderment that the Iron Sand doesn’t respond to Kankuro’s intrusion. “And Gaara and Lee, too! Da-_arn_, it’s practically a family reunion in here!” He pauses in his meandering to the coffee pot to give Lee an odd look. “You, uh, you planning on making a fire or somethin’?” 

“Ah, we had, um,” Lee stammers, “a bit of a challenging situation just—”

“Shinki broke the chair,” Gaara cuts in bluntly. “It won’t happen again.” 

Kankuro shrugs. “Ugly old thing anyway,” he remarks as he pours himself a mug of Lee’s strong coffee. “Probably been sittin’ around this place since before the Third Kazekage was born.” He takes a sip and grimaces. “Fffff-_lip_! You put axle grease in this stuff? It’s thick as mud.” 

“The best start to a morning is a bracing cup of strong coffee!” Lee chirps. “Also, that has been sitting out for a while.” 

Kankuro sets the cup down with a sneer of distaste. “Well. I was gonna make pancakes for breakfast. That sound good to everyone? Hey, squirt!” 

Gaara raises his head, but Kankuro’s clearly directing the nickname at Shinki. 

“You like pancakes?” 

Shinki’s eyes widen. He nods his head eagerly. 

Lee interjects, “That is not exactly the most nutritious—”

“I’ll put fruit on ‘em, jeez. Chill out, will ya?” 

Lee’s mouth collapses into a tight frown. “Did you see Metal? He went to wake you.” 

“Aw, man, is that what all that racket was?” Kankuro stands with a mixing bowl and pan in his arms and sets them on the counter with a clatter. “Nah, he was long gone by the time I got up.” 

“I should go find him,” Lee says tersely. “Just because we are out of the village is no reason for him to slack on his training.” 

Gaara casts his chakra into the sandstone that makes up the house’s walls and foundation. Metal’s chakra is back in his makeshift bedroom, a calm, contented sphere of humming warmth. At rest or at play. 

He lays a hand on Lee’s arm before he can leave the room. 

“Stay,” he says. “I need your help with something.” 

Lee gives him a questioning look, but his body stills under Gaara’s touch. 

“Shinki,” Gaara calls, “you need to wash up before breakfast. Do you know how to give yourself a bath?” 

Gaara racks his brain for the memory of the child development books he picked up when Shikadai was first born. He should be able to bathe himself at his age, shouldn’t he? Metal can, he thinks, though Konoha is particular about traditional family bath times, so Lee is always in there with him. The two boys are at least _close_ in age, as far as Gaara can estimate, though he suspects Metal is a bit older—it’s hard to tell how much of Shinki’s slight stature owes to his age or to something more sinister. (_Malnutrition,_ whispers the voice in Gaara’s head that sounds less like Shukaku and more like Yashamaru these days, _neglect_. The way Shinki’s eyes went wide and watery at Kankuro’s offer of breakfast … was it simple childish eagerness, or something more?) 

Either way, Gaara certainly hopes Shinki can take care of his own bath; he doesn’t relish the idea of any of them doing battle with the Iron Sand in the bathroom. He just had the taps fixed after the last time Kankuro tested one of his puppets’ waterproofing in the shower. Chances are a child that age isn’t the best judge of his own independence, but in the absence of his own expertise, Gaara will have to roll the dice. 

“Lee and Kankuro can help you.” 

Back at the counter, Kankuro points to himself and mouths, _Me?_ He gestures animatedly to the breakfast dishes and ingredients he’s already assembled. Gaara waves him still with a flick of his fingers. He’s more than capable of handling _pancakes_. And he needs to stay where he is, so he can collect his paperwork from Shijima when she arrives. 

Shinki crosses his arms. “I can do it myself.” 

Gaara nods his acquiescence. “Someone to show you to the bathroom, then. To wait outside in case you need help. And—” He eyes Shinki’s sand-caked storm gear beneath the cloak of Iron Sand draped around him. The clothes are tattered, smeared with sweat and greasepaint. Gaara suspects by the smell that there’s still flecks of blood on the cloth. Even as fast as Lee can move, there’s no chance the clothes will be washed and mended by the time Shinki’s done bathing. “—to find you some clean clothes.” 

Lee perks up immediately. In his mind’s eye, Gaara can already see him measuring Shinki for a bright green jumpsuit. Gaara doesn’t mind the jumpsuits, truth be told. They’re actually quite comfortable, the fabric breathable and elastic. But he’s heard the way the other shinobi talk when they think he isn’t listening. And the color sticks out like a sore thumb in the desert. 

“Kankuro, you can find him something, can’t you? Maybe from one of your smaller puppets.” 

Kankuro scratches his head. “I mean, probably? I’d have to disarm it, but … yeah. I think Grey Fox is about the right size.” 

“Then it’s settled. Shinki, go on. Kankuro will show you to the bathroom.” 

Lee makes to follow them, but Gaara’s grip tightens on his arm. A small, shuddery breath escapes him. 

“Are you all right?” Gaara murmurs, head inclined towards Lee’s ear. 

Lee’s mouth is still that pursed line, all tension. His breathing irregular. “Yes,” he says, “I’m fine. It’s just … he favors you, doesn’t he?” 

“Who, Kankuro?” Gaara has heard it said before, that their family resemblance is stronger when Kankuro has the paint off and his hair showing, but Lee has seen Kankuro without his paint and hood dozens of times. Why would he mention that now?

Lee shakes his head. “No, Shinki. Around the eyes.” He inhales sharply. “It’s strange.” 

_Ah._

“Because of the magnet release.” The same dark circles that Gaara bears, that his father and the Third Kazekage before them wore. 

“No, not the markings.” Lee turns from staring down the hall to look at Gaara, his gaze searching. “I mean his … his _expression_. He looks like how you used to look. Before—before we became friends. Before Naruto.”

  


* * *

  


Shijima knocks just as Gaara is pouring batter into the pan, the sand whisking eggs to his right and putting on a kettle for tea to his left. Metal is sitting on one of the remaining kitchen chairs behind him, summoned by the smell of cooking food, his little legs kicking high above the ground. He has a few crayons in his mouth and another clutched in his fist, drawing something. Gaara couldn’t make heads or tails of it. When he asked Metal what it was, the response was simply, ‘A picture for my new friend.’

“Come in,” Gaara calls, and he senses Shijima’s chakra breaching the front door.

The stack of paper in her arms nearly covers her face as she walks half-blindly into the kitchen. She deposits them on the table with a _thump_, and a few scrolls clatter to the floor. She’s the picture of poise, even as she sweeps a few stray hairs back into her tight bun. 

“Smells good in here,” she says, blinking owlishly as the cooking steam fogs her thick glasses. “I thought you said you were having an emergen—_Oh!_” Her gaze alights on Metal, and a wide, sly smile breaks across her face. She removes her glasses to wipe them on her sleeve, squinting down at him. “Good morning, Metal. I didn’t realize you were in town.” 

“Good morning, Auntie Shijima!” Metal recites with perfect diction that would make his father proud. Though he doesn’t lift his face from the paper where he’s carefully scribbling with the green crayon, nose almost touching the surface of the table. 

“His papa’s here, too, I assume?” She directs her question to Gaara with a lascivious wink. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have brought so much _boring_ paperwork.” She stoops and gathers the bulk of the paper back into her arms. “I’ll just leave these in your office, shall I? The trade contract with Kumo can wait.” 

“That won’t be—” Gaara begins, but she’s already sweeping out of the room. 

“Metal, be a dear and grab those scrolls for me, will you?” she calls over her shoulder. 

Metal scrambles after her with a, “Yes, Auntie!” 

Gaara pauses for a moment to watch them go and very nearly burns the first batch of pancakes. He salvages them, but only barely, and mentally assigns the darker few to Kankuro’s plate. 

Once things are mostly under control, or at least in a temporary state of self-sustainability, Gaara wanders over to the table where Metal has left his drawing. It’s people—a lot of them—though Metal’s artistic skills are such that they mostly look like leggy blobs with giant eyes. Gaara is mostly certain one is Lee only because of the thick eyebrows that have been drawn in, though Lee’s eyebrows are black, not the bright green Metal has chosen for his rendition. The rest … Gara isn’t sure. He’ll ask Metal when he comes back, the way Lee taught him to. _Tell me about your picture,_ not, _What is that supposed to be?_

Children are fragile, Gaara knows, and the wrong words, the wrong actions have the potential to do great harm. And it is _so much easier_ to do harm than Gaara ever thought, when he first learned that Temari, and later Lee, were having children. He assumed, perhaps naively, that if you only refrained from doing deliberate evil—not trying to stab them, or starve them, or seal tailed beasts inside them—that things would turn out all right. He was so wrong it scared him. 

There isn’t just a _wrong_ way to do things, it turns out, there’s a _right_ way too. A careful balance of nurturing and love and discipline that Gaara sees reflected in his sister’s hand, tousling her son’s hair, or Lee’s shouts of encouragement as he does push-ups alongside Metal. Gaara has read the books, he has watched the parents he knows—he’s even spoken to the medi-nin in the obstetrics ward at the hospital and the woman who trains the foster parents for the war orphans—but he despairs of ever accessing such human instincts. 

“All it really takes is love, Kazekage-sama,” the medi-nin told him, and his scar burned with it. Love. He thinks he knows what it is, now, but he can never be sure. Sure that he’s _loving_ the right way. That he’s doing more good than evil. Negligence, ignorance, callousness—these things can hurt just as much as any kunai to the throat.

A careful distance, then, is necessary around the children in his life. He can be a protector, certainly, a friend, maybe, a caregiver ... but never a parent.

With Shinki under his care, however temporarily, the fear of getting things _wrong_—of doing some terrible, irreparable harm—is all the greater. He’s the sole provider in this situation, after all, even with the help of his siblings and his—_partner_. There is no ‘real’ parent here to swoop in and save them both, to kiss the mistakes better and soothe any hurts Gaara might inadvertently cause. 

The kitchen quickly devolves from quiet into chaos, disturbing Gaara’s reverie, as Shinki returns from his bath with Kankuro and Lee in tow. 

Whatever puppet’s outfit Kankuro sacrificed for Shinki to wear, it’s clearly much too large. Long in the arms and legs, hastily rolled and pinned so Shinki doesn’t trip and fall over the hems. Kankuro makes a little _tada_ gesture at his handiwork and then signs behind the boy’s head, _Shopping later._

“Wasn’t that refreshing, Shinki-kun?” Lee asks with a smile. Gaara bristles at the unnecessary honorific. It’s Lee’s way of putting distance between himself and the people in his life. He still uses them with Kankuro and Temari as well, even after years of being practically family. He’ll allow his son to call them ‘Auntie’ and ‘Uncle’, but he won’t allow himself to call them by their names. “A bath always makes me feel better!” 

Shinki shrugs, and the Iron Sand snaps at Lee’s hand when he goes to push a strand of wet hair from Shinki’s face. 

“I’ll do your paint up after breakfast if you want,” Kankuro offers, already collapsing in one of the kitchen chairs. Spindly wood creaks warningly beneath him. “Once you’re all dried off.” 

Shinki eyes him and nods, hesitant in his silence, then takes the chair next to Kankuro’s. The Iron Sand picks him up and sets him in the high seat. 

Lee rushes across the kitchen floor to help at the stove. Gaara doesn’t miss Shinki’s look of frank shock as Lee easily takes one of the pans from an arm of sand without the slightest hint of fear. 

“What color d’you want?” Kankuro asks. “I’ve got pretty much everything in my workshop.” 

Shinki’s examining the crayons on the table with an expression of deep scrutiny. “Purple,” he says slowly, as he pulls the picture Metal has drawn towards him, confusion writ large on his face. 

Kankuro puffs up like a burrow owl, unnoticing of Shinki’s consternation as he crows, “Great choice!” 

“Hey, you found the picture!” 

Shinki looks up in shock to Metal standing in the doorway. Shijima towers behind him, her height even more pronounced in contrast to Metal’s tiny body. Metal is tall for his age, but Shijima is taller even than Lee, all limb. Her glasses make her odd-colored eyes appear enormous, but they widen even further at the sight of the additional small figure seated at Gaara’s breakfast table. The distorted pupils of her failed Sharingan dilate with surprise.

“How’d you know it’s for you?” Metal pulls his chair right up beside Shinki’s, well within his personal space. Gaara braces for the impact. “You must be really smart!” He tugs the paper from Shinki’s unmoving fingers. “See, this is me, and this is Papa, and this is Gaara, and this is you. I didn’t know what color to draw your hair so I made you bald. Hey, can you hand me that brown crayon?” 

Shinki’s wide eyes track from Metal to Lee. Lee’s bent over the counter to very enthusiastically slice a bowl of desert pears, so focused on his work that he’s seemingly ignorant of the meeting taking place behind him. Shinki looks back to Metal, then to Lee again. Gaara has seen this same sequence of events play out many times. First the legwarmers, then the jumpsuit, then the eyebrows and bowlcut. Then Metal smiles, and Lee turns around wearing the same grin. 

“Your … father.” Shinki points at Lee, completely ignoring Metal’s questions. He looks slowly to Shijima, then back to Lee and Metal again. “And … your mother?” 

Shijima muffles a guffaw behind her hand. “Oh, _no_.” 

“I don’t have a mama!” Metal chirps. “And that’s okay, right Papa? Because I have Papa, and Gaara, and Uncle Kankuro, and Aunt Temari, and Aunt Tenten, and Grandpa Gai, and Grandpa Kakashi, and—” 

“Metal has a, um,” Lee cuts in, “a rather large extended family, back in Konoha. Maybe you can meet them some day!” 

Shinki’s shoulders are all the way up around his ears, his body tense and bristling, teeth bared like a predator defending its den. He squints his eyes shut. When he opens them again, they look watery. 

“I _had_—” he starts to say. 

“And who is this?” Shijima interrupts before Gaara can execute a plan to avert the tantrum. Shinki’s mouth snaps shut, his eyes wide and wary. “You’re too young to be a genin. Kankuro-sama, don’t tell me you’ve been poaching students from the academy again. You know how angry the first years’ teacher got last time.” 

“That only happened once!” Kankuro yells. “Not my fault they can’t see natural aptitude for poisons when it presents itself!” 

“Didn’t Senko-chan nearly kill her sensei with a poisoned canteen?” Lee adopts an expression of grave unease. 

“_And_ came up with an antidote all on her own!” Kankuro shouts back. “She woulda been a damn fine genin—” (Lee hisses, “Language!”) “—and them holding her back a year over it was a load of bull—_poo_.” 

Shijima ignores them both and stoops down. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” She extends one long, thin hand towards Shinki and takes his tiny hand in hers in a shake. “I’m Shijima, pleased to meet you.” 

Shinki stills for a moment in shock, but then returns the shake very delicately, prying his hand away as quickly as he can manage it.

“Shijima is my assistant,” Gaara explains. “Shijima, this is my … ” Words freeze on his tongue. “... my temporary ward, Shinki.” 

“How strong is she?” Shinki directs the question to Gaara. 

The crescent-moon smile on Shijima’s face widens to a half. “Do you want to find out?” 

“No,” Gaara interjects before Shinki can answer in the affirmative. 

Kankuro cackles, kicking back and resting his feet on the table in a display that has Metal gathering his crayons in shock and appall. “Aww, go on. Let the kid live a little.” 

“_No,_” Gaara repeats. 

Kankuro turns to his left, where Shinki is lifting his feet to see if he can put them on the table as well until Gaara stops him with a look. “Kid, let me give you a piece of advice you’ll carry with you the rest of your life. _Never_ cross a kunoichi. Especially the ones that hang around Gaara.” 

Shijima titters behind her hand and cuts her eyes at Gaara. 

“He has your manners, Kazekage-sama.” 

“He’s been here for three days.” 

She hums. “Even so.” 

“Are you staying for breakfast?” Gaara’s sand begins opening the cabinets behind him, pulling down plates and bowls. 

Shjima smiles demurely. “If Shinki-kun will allow it.” 

Shinki has gone back to ignoring her, watching Kankuro clean under his nails with a senbon with rapt attention. 

“Metal?” 

Metal perks up. “Papa, can I?” 

Lee looks over the spread dubiously. Beside the towering stack of pancakes drenched in cloyingly heavy whipped cream and fruit, there’s a mixing bowl full of scrambled eggs, a pot of rice from the rice-maker, and two different kinds of tea. “You’ve already eaten—” 

Metal’s shoulders slump. 

“—_but_, I suppose it is a special occasion. As long as you don’t ruin your appetite for lunch.” 

Metal punches the air and cheers. “Thank you, Papa!” 

It’s a bit of an ordeal, clearing enough space around the table for everyone to sit together. Gaara conscripts Kankuro’s assistance to carry the chair down from his office and pull another few from the sitting room, a task Shinki insists on helping with. 

Gaara and Lee set the table. As they’re laying out the cups and plates, Gaara dips his head onto Lee’s shoulder. 

“I am fine,” Lee whispers, low enough that Metal, packing away his crayons, can’t hear them. But he sets a teapot down so heavily that Shijima, neatly arranging Metal’s crayons in their box by color, looks up at them in question. And his mouth draws down into a worried, pensive frown, even as Shinki’s laughter carries him and Kankuro back into the kitchen with the extra chairs. 

Kankuro feigns stumbling under the weight of one of them, and Shinki giggles to discover he’s able to carry it on his own, even without the Iron Sand’s assistance. 

“I can get it!” he shouts, as Shijima goes to take her seat. He pulls the chair out for her with a beaming grin, and pushes it back in when she sits (though he needs the help of the Iron Sand once she’s seated). 

“I take it back, Kazekage-sama,” Shijima says, as Shinki, after seemingly pained deliberation, clambers into the seat between Gaara and Kankuro, rather than the seat between Kankuro and Shijima. “His manners are much better than yours.” 

They all squeeze together, shoulder-to-shoulder around the cramped table that never expected to hold more than four people at a time. 

Over the clatter of dishware, the clamor of ‘Please-pass-the’s and ‘Thank-you-for-the-food’s, and the slurping of too-hot tea, Shinki leans over to Gaara and says, “There’s a lot of people in your house.”

Gaara pauses with his napkin halfway to his mouth. This is something he never expected. He thought, when he was younger, that he might spend his whole life in solitude. Just himself and his demon, so entwined that he could scarcely tell the two of them apart. He never would have expected siblings, friends, a partner. Children laughing in the hallways, the adults bickering over who has to wash the breakfast dishes. A house full of people who care for him, and whom he cares for, lives intertwined like the strands of a spider’s web. _Bonds._ Everyone bustling about their own business but still inextricably connected, noisy and crowded and full of life. 

He likes the quiet, values his solitude, but this? Kankuro upending a rice bowl and Metal going scrambling for the dustpan. An extra kettle of tea on the hob whistling its completion and Lee pouring Gaara a third cup before he even thinks to ask. Shijima absent-mindedly dabbing a speck of stray whipped cream from Shinki’s nose. This … this is evidence of love, writ loud and boisterous. It’s what he’s always dreamed of. 

“Yes,” he says, finally. “Yes, there are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hit me up on Tumblr [@ghoste-catte](https://ghoste-catte.tumblr.com)!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warnings** this chapter: alcohol use, minor injuries, canon-typical violence, night terrors. Childhood trauma remains a theme.

Temari arrives that day at noon. 

“I come bearing gifts,” she announces, setting her pack down on the kitchen table with a _thump_. 

Kankuro breezes past and grabs his bottle of sake, pressing an obnoxiously loud kiss to the top of Temari’s head. 

He raises the bottle in a _cheers_ gesture before twisting the cap off and taking a hearty swig.

“It’s lunchtime,” Gaara reminds him from behind the stack of papers he’s arranged on the table, a better vantage point for keeping track of the goings-on of the household. 

“Ahhh!” Kankuro throws his head back with a smack of his lips and a sigh. “That really hits the spot! I don’t know what those deer put in this stuff, but it’s the best!” 

Temari pauses finger-combing her hair back into order so she can smirk at him. “It’s piss.”

Kankuro’s eyes go momentarily wide before he sees the wrinkling at the corner of Temari’s and groans. “Aww, c’mon! Why do you always try to ruin stuff for me? Gaara, tell her to stop bullying me!” 

“It might be piss,” Gaara replies indifferently, shuffling his papers.

Kankuro pushes the bottle away from himself on the counter with a suspicious glare. 

“Gaara, this one’s for you.” Temari sets a pot down heavily on the table. A seedling curls up from within, just green and starting to grow woody around the base. “From the Nara gardens.”

“Baby’s breath _spirea_,” Gaara says, running a thumb over a blade-shaped leaf. “It’s beautiful. They’re very drought-tolerant. Shikamaru remembered I mentioned them last time.”

Temari shrugs. “Yeah, well. He sends his regards. He’s sorry he couldn’t come meet the new arrival. Clan business, you know how it is.”

“I’ll send him a thank-you note,” says Gaara, setting the pot aside to be used as a temporary paperweight. 

Temari’s and Kankuro’s faces morph into identical grimaces.

“No?” Gaara hedges. 

“Don’t make it weird,” Kankuro comments. He’s retrieved his sake and now he’s sitting on the counter with his legs kicking like a toddler’s, twisting the bottle in his hands.

“You’re basically his baby brother now,” Temari adds. “There’s no need to be so formal. I’ll just tell him you liked it, how about that?” 

Gaara purses his lips and nods, but it feels somehow unsatisfying. Too close and too familiar. 

He’s happy, of course, that Temari and Shikamaru have found each other. Shikamaru is a good man, a good husband and father. But broadening his definition of ‘brotherhood’ … for some reason, it puts Gaara on edge. 

Temari clearly hasn’t noticed his hesitation, because she’s rooting around in the depths of her pack once more. 

“Knowing Lee, he didn’t think to pack anything but the essentials, so—” She slaps down a bag of hard candy, multicolored sugar stars gaudily shining from behind clear plastic. “—I brought some candy for Metal.” She narrows her eyes. “Where are they, anyway?” 

“Out back, trai—”

“_Hee-yah!_” The sound pierces through the kitchen window in duplicate, the loud cry and its high-pitched echo. 

“That answers that.” Temari makes an exasperated face, but it’s softer than her normal weariness, fonder. “And the new little guy? When do I get to meet him?” 

“Asleep again,” Kankuro says, and Gaara reaches out with his chakra to confirm. “I swear, the kid sleeps more than a hibernating bear.” 

Temari’s lower lip juts out in concern. She’s generally rather guarded with her expressions, but there’s a protective maternal instinct in her as wide as the desert is dry. 

“Is he okay?” 

“He had another outburst earlier,” Gaara advises her, with no idea if this is any solace at all. “His chakra control is … untrained. Any exertion drains him.” 

“Man!” Kankuro sets his bottle down heavily, his words already loose and lazy. Gaara sends a tendril of sand across the kitchen to snatch the bottle from him and store it in a cabinet. “With chakra like that, you gotta wonder how his parents kept him under wraps for so long.” 

Temari’s eyes dart from Kankuro’s unfocused gaze to Gaara’s keener one. She opens her mouth, but then she pauses, and there’s an unreadable expression there, deep lines on her forehead, tension in the crows’ feet that are just starting to form at the corner of her eyelids. 

“I have a few ideas,” she says gravely. 

“Why don’t we all wash up and eat,” Gaara interjects, not quite ready to explore the possibilities of Shinki’s early upbringing, not while Temari is still dusty and careworn from the road, “and then I’ll take you to see him.”

  


* * *

  


After lunch, Kankuro stands to escort Metal down to his workshop for ‘training’. Gaara suspects it will mostly be Metal playing dress-up with Kankuro’s puppets, since he doesn’t have even a fraction of the control needed to form chakra threads yet. 

Metal goes, but not without a last, longing look at the bag of candies sitting on the kitchen table. 

Lee sets a bandaged hand atop the bag with a crinkle of plastic. 

“Not until after dinner,” he says firmly. “Tell Temari thank you.”

“Thank you, auntie!” Metal calls as Kankuro steers him from the room. 

“Ugh,” Temari grunts, pinching the ridge of her brow. “Please don’t have him call me that. It makes me feel old.” 

“We are old,” Gaara reminds her. 

He knows that, technically speaking, none of them are old, but shinobi’s lives tend to be short and brutal. Temari has already outlived their mother, and Gaara is not so many years off from the age his father was when he was killed. For someone who never expected to live to see adulthood, who spent a childhood anticipating assassination around every corner, it’s still an adjustment. 

“Speak for yourself!” Lee puffs his chest. “I am in the prime of the Springtime of my Youth!” 

Temari rolls her eyes. With the kitchen door shut and little prying ears far distant, she turns her sharp gaze to them both. 

It’s still intimidating, being stared down by his sister. At times Gaara misses his preadolescence, when he could at least pretend he feared nothing and nobody. Now he searches for Lee’s hand beneath the table and takes it. Lee squeezes his fingers in reassurance. 

“Why didn’t we just travel together?” Across the kitchen table from Gaara and Lee, Temari lays into her interrogation, eyes keen through the steam rising from her coffee mug. “We could have shared watch.”

Lee makes a conflicted face. “I didn’t realize you were coming.”

“Of course I was coming! My baby brother digs up a toddler in a sandstorm, and you didn’t think I would come running?”

“Wait—” Lee frowns. “They told you what was going on before you got here?”

“They _didn’t_ tell you?” 

Temari and Lee turn to face Gaara in a single motion. Gaara fairly cowers behind his teacup under the intensity of their stares. He hadn’t expected that Temari and Lee would get on so well, when the status of his and Lee’s relationship moved from ‘open secret’ to ‘semi-official’. Neither could he have predicted how easily they would ally over certain topics … such as their mutual disapproval of Kankuro’s less-savory habits, or their often simultaneous consternation over Gaara’s more socially inept actions. 

Lee didn’t have much to say to Gaara after his outburst the previous night. He was already laying in bed, eyes closed and half-drowsing, by the time Gaara finished his paperwork and made it to their room. Lee rolled over just long enough to pull down the collar of Gaara’s shirt and check that the bandages were in their promised location. He opened his mouth, looking like he wanted to say something—Lee has always been the type to want to talk through his feelings the second they make themselves known to him, if he can’t run them off or train them into submission—but something he saw on Gaara’s face seemed to make him quiet instead. 

“Are you sleeping tonight?” was what he asked, as Gaara sat down on the side of the bed. 

Gaara’s bed is always warmer with Lee in it, more inviting with the indentation of Lee’s head on the pillow, his glass of water on the nightstand. 

“I’m going to try.” It hardly counted as an answer. Sleep still doesn’t come easily to Gaara, even though it’s been years since he last spoke to the demon, even though he’s on much easier terms with his own mind. He sleeps lightly when he sleeps at all, easily plagued by nightmares and quick to stir at the slightest noise or movement.

“Okay,” Lee said, “Goodnight.”

That was the last he spoke until this morning, though Gaara knew Lee awoke when Gaara abandoned sleep and retreated from the room to haunt the hallways of his home, checking and re-checking the doors to every room for any sign of disturbance, a comforting routine when sleep is further away than his anxieties. 

Gaara dozed lightly in a kitchen chair eventually, until Lee and Metal woke before the sunrise, chipper and cheery as they went about their shared morning routine. 

“Gaara,” Lee says now, eyebrows furrowed and eyes searching. His fingers tighten, twined in Gaara’s beneath the tabletop. “Why—”

“Kankuro was the one who sent for Temari,” Gaara says gruffly, looking away. His fingers twitch away, unworthy of Lee’s gentle touch. Lee releases him immediately. “I didn’t know how to explain it.” 

“That’s—” Lee frowns. “I mean, I _understand_, but … You know you can tell me anything, right?” 

Gaara’s eyes linger on the door. 

He does _know_, but anything too heavy with emotion is difficult for him even now, even after years of working through his own personal failings. It’s harder still when he can’t see the person he’s talking to, when he can’t read their own emotions on their face. He was worried about Lee’s reaction, about not being able to understand him properly by voice alone, distorted by a telephone’s crackle. He needed to tell him about Shinki in person. 

He doesn’t know how to articulate any of that, either, so instead he says, “Yes.” His voice is less than a whisper. “I know.” 

Temari raps her fingernails on her coffee cup, and Lee jumps. Gaara nearly forgot she was there, sitting across from them both with her now-empty mug in her hand. 

“So,” she says, not the slightest hint of awkwardness on her face despite witnessing the burnt ember of their earlier argument. “Do I get to meet the kid now?”

  


* * *

  


Lee excuses himself to track down Metal while Gaara leads his sister down the now-familiar darkened hallway to what has become Shinki’s room. 

Within, Shinki is sleeping quietly. There are no nightmares to disturb him, no scenes of terror played out in shadowy, grainy forms. But the Iron Sand still surrounds his quiescent face, curled up around him like a mother bird’s wings, with his pale face like a carefully guarded egg between its feathers. 

Gaara strains the edges of his chakra to probe the boy’s and finds it still depleted. 

Behind him, Temari hisses in sympathy. She must sense it too. 

“His chakra’s a mess,” she whispers.

Gaara inclines his head in acknowledgement. Of the three siblings, Kankuro is the only one with any talent for medical jutsu, but anyone with the slightest sensitivity could feel the disquiet in Shinki’s chakra, the unevenness of its expulsion from his body. He’s using it now, even as he sleeps, keeping the sand aloft and around him. 

There is no Ultimate Defense protecting him, no parental spirit whose chakra surrounds him and keeps him safe. All the actions of the Iron Sand are just Shinki’s own protective instinct, his desperation to keep himself safe. 

On the bed, Shinki’s small mouth wrinkles. His nose scrunches. A soft cry pierces the air, and the Iron Sand responds, pulling the covers up higher over his chest, tucking the blanket in around his shoulders. 

Shinki whimpers. There’s something glistening at the corner of his eye.

He’s crying in his sleep. 

Gaara goes to him immediately, toeing the door most of the way shut behind him to muffle the sounds of the household. He leaves Temari standing in the doorway, a silent sentry keeping watch. 

“Shh,” he murmurs, and the Iron Sand parts easily to permit his hand to stroke Shinki’s forehead. “You’re safe. I’m right here.” 

Shinki’s face turns towards him in sleep. The Iron Sand reaches for Gaara in the shape of a hand and pulls him closer. His hand settles fully in Shinki’s hair, against the fragile bones of his skull. Despite his earlier bath, he’s sweat onto the pillow again, and his hair is greasy once more with it. 

He continues to pet Shinki’s head gently, whispering reassurances that, while he can’t guarantee them, he truly means. 

Reassurances like, “I’ll protect you,” and “Everything will be all right.”

Comfort has never come so easily to him. 

Gaara uses his sleeve to mop the tears from Shinki’s face. No more of them fall. 

Gradually, the Iron Sand releases him. 

Certain Shinki is sleeping peacefully once more, Gaara slips from the room. He leaves behind a handful of his own sand on the bedside table. It’s not quite a Third Eye, but it has enough of his chakra in it to sense any further disturbance without requiring too much focus to maintain. 

Temari’s watching him with a strange expression when he returns to the hall and shuts the door behind him. 

After a moment’s hesitation, she reaches for Gaara’s head and ruffles his hair. He bows his chin beneath the pressure. 

Staring at the floor, he’s a little surprised with himself. He brought Temari here for her advice, but he needed no help from her just now. He just did what came naturally, and for once it didn’t end in pain and bloodshed. 

Temari pushes him back by the shoulders, studying his face. Her mouth is pursed, the wrinkles around her eyes pronounced.

Suddenly, fiercely, she pulls him into a hug. 

Gaara leans into the solidity of her grip. 

Gaara spent most of his formative years struggling to stand on his own, but he’s learned in his adulthood that he doesn’t always have to. It’s much more valuable to surround himself with others who are more competent than he is, to shore up all his weak points. He can permit himself the gift, at times, of leaning on others, of relying on them. In life as in battle. 

He presses his face hard against his sister’s shoulder, the ropy muscle there. 

He’s not sure when he started crying. 

“You did good,” she whispers, scrubbing roughly at the hair on the back of his head. “You made the right decision.” 

He doesn’t know whether she means just now, or if she’s talking about that evening in the sandstorm, when Gaara made the most impulsive choice of his life. 

He throws his arms around his sister. His hands form claws, gripping hard at the back of her shirt. His tears dampen the fabric at her shoulder. 

He feels so terribly, terrifyingly young right now.

A sob rips from him, stifled by Temari’s shoulder. She pats him on the back and makes the soft, soothing noises he’s heard her use on Shikadai. 

Eventually, the tears dry. His breathing calms. 

He stands back, and Temari lets him go.

Her voice, too, is a little wet, a little touched when she says, “Has anyone mentioned he’s just the spit of you?”

Gaara takes a slow, shaky breath. He wipes his sore and reddened eyes on the back of his sleeve.

“Lee said something similar, earlier.”

“He’s taking this pretty hard, huh?” Temari’s pale eyebrows furrow. 

“He is?” 

“Seems like he’s struggling more than you are, actually.” 

It’s as if the stone floor has dropped from beneath Gaara’s feet. Lee is supposed to be his foundation, his anchor. If Lee is foundering even a fraction as hard as Gaara is right now … 

The muscles of his chest tighten—not the ones that move his arms, but the ones that lay deeper, between his ribs to protect his tremoring heart. The edges of them fizzle with painful, panicked electricity. His pulse is racing down the side of his throat. 

Gaara exhales. Inhales. Exhales again. Focuses on the pace of his breathing, the warm stone beneath his feet. He clenches his fingers and feels the tension of each muscle up along his arms. Releases. 

“Shinki doesn’t like him,” he says finally, roughly. 

Temari snorts. “They’ve known each other for what, a day? Lee’s kind of an acquired taste, if you know what I mean.”

Gaara remembers his first impression of Lee, a loudmouthed buffoon making a fool of himself for the sake of a pretty girl, wearing his heart on his sleeve as flagrantly as he wore his orange legwarmers. He dismissed Lee then. He’s only glad he had the opportunity to correct his mistake, that Lee was willing to grant him that kindness. 

“So he’s just gonna avoid the kid?” Temari prods. “That’s his solution?”

“We haven’t had time to discuss it,” Gaara mutters. “Things have been busy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“These things take time.”

“Time you don’t have, if this is as temporary an arrangement as you claim,” she reminds him. 

Gaara startles. 

“Shinki will still need someone to train him,” he says, a bit defensively. “I’m obviously not a suitable foster parent, but there is no one else in the village with Magnet Release. I’ve … taught genin before. He’ll need someone to help him hone his control. I _promised_.” 

Temari chews her lip, like she’s biting back many words she’d rather say. 

“Then you should talk to Lee.” She words it like a suggestion, but Gaara can read under her tone. _Big sister knows best._

“I will,” Gaara agrees. “Soon.” 

“Y’know,” Temari says, as they turn and begin to make their way up the hall, her fingers tapping on the small fan at her waist, “I expected this level of anxiety from Kankuro, but I thought you’d be coping a little better, as much time as you spend with Metal.”

“Oi—!” interrupts a voice from the end of the hallway, a shout pitched into a whisper. Kankuro’s standing there with a small puppet’s limp body in his hand, one of the transmitter ones that he uses for espionage. If he’s expecting his siblings to think he’s simply strolling casually around the house working on something with so many tiny moving parts, he’s mistaken. 

Kankuro checks on Shinki almost as obsessively as Gaara does. Gaara’s caught him standing in the doorway to the small room, staring at Shinki’s sleeping form on the bed on more than one of his nightly rounds of the quiet house. He wonders if his brother feels guilt about it, for not having known until it was too late, the living secret that lingered in his corps, that got one of his soldiers killed. 

Kankuro spits out a tiny screwdriver he must have been holding in his cheek and brandishes it like a senbon as he approaches his siblings.

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

  


* * *

  


“Hey! That’s my room you’re sleeping in!” 

Gaara wonders if the hallway outside Metal’s room will ever cease to be the scene of confrontation, or if this is simply the pattern of his life now. 

He’s just gotten Shinki up for dinner, just in time for Lee to be bringing Metal up the hall, scrubbed clean and pink-cheeked from their bath. They look more a matching set now than ever, with identical white towels around their shoulders and their bowl cuts just slightly damp in the dry heat. 

Gaara’s hand tightens on Shinki’s shoulder, aware of the way the Iron Sand bristles at the sudden noise. 

Metal turns his face up to look at his Papa, all sunshine.

“Why can’t we share? Like me an’ Inojin share my room when you and Auntie Ino are on missions.” 

Lee’s eyes flick to Gaara’s. The Iron Sand comes up over Shinki’s face and wraps around him like a cocoon. 

“I … don’t think that’s a good idea right now,” Lee says cautiously. 

“Are you taking good care of my toys?” Metal bounds halfway down the hall in an instant. “You can play with them. I don’t mind.” 

Before Gaara can react, Metal darts around both him and Shinki to peer into his room. 

Gaara can’t see Metal’s face, but there’s no missing the bewildered, distressed slump of his shoulders, the way his head turns increasingly rapidly to stare around the room.

“Where’s all my stuff?” His voice is tremulous, weak. It echoes, faintly, off the bare walls of his once heavily decorated room. 

He turns to look at Gaara, and his eyes are so wide and watery they look just like Lee’s.

“What happened to my turtle bank?” Metal whispers, his eyebrows furrowed in a perfect miniature of Lee’s when he’s on the verge of tears. True tears, not the emotion-wrought fake sobs evoked by inspiration or beauty. 

There’s a rustle as the Iron Sand sloughs away from Shinki’s face. 

“It’s broken.” Shinki raises his chin, defiant. The sand has smeared Kankuro’s paint all down his cheeks, and purple streaks his pale face like tear tracks. 

“It was an accident,” Gaara hastens to add. 

“You _broke_ it?” Metal’s voice pitches up into a shriek. He’s actually crying now. Fat, shining tears wobble towards his crumpled chin. 

Gaara’s heart breaks, just a little. He hates seeing Metal cry, even over something as inconsequential as a toy. 

“Perhaps we can fix it!” Lee chimes from somewhere over Gaara’s shoulder. 

Gaara shoots him a look. 

The turtle was little more than ceramic dust, after Shinki’s destructive tantrum. If the Iron Sand works like Gaara’s own, it will have divested the shards of their minerals for its own purposes and purged the rest. 

Metal, ever sensitive, sees the look on Gaara’s face and begins to wail. 

“Or, er.” Lee falters, his expression nervous. “We can replace it?”

“Gran’pa Gai gave me it!” Metal’s voice is so high and distorted by his sobs that it’s difficult to understand him. “He said to keep it safe until I’m big. I’m s’posed to save up for when I get my summons, and I—I—” Metal balls up his fists. “Ningame won’t trust me now!” 

“Who’s—” Shinki starts to say. Caught up by Metal’s explosive emotions, Gaara hasn’t been paying attention to him, but when he turns now, he sees Shinki’s features crumpled with barely contained rage. 

“You—you—” Metal sticks out one shaking finger and points it at Shinki. “You big, mean _jerk!_”

Lee gasps. “Metal, be nice!”

“No!” Metal stamps one tiny foot. “I don’t wanna be nice! I don’t wanna be his friend anymore!” 

“I don’t want to be your friend either,” Shinki says lowly. The Iron Sand is looming up behind him now. The air crackles with his chakra. 

Gaara and Lee sense the pending attack at the same moment. Gaara throws a wall of sand between the boys just as Lee dodges forward and restrains Shinki by the head and chest, hauling him up and off the ground. 

There’s a hiss, a _crack_, then a bitten-off grunt of pain. 

A massive bolt of Iron Sand juts from the sand barrier Gaara’s thrown down, still trembling from the impact. 

Behind him, Gaara hears the _thud_ of a tiny foot kicking Lee in the gut, and a measured exhale as the kick has no effect against the braced muscles of Lee’s abdomen. 

Gaara takes a thin breath and lets his sand fall, dragging the Iron Sand to the ground with it. Metal’s pressed up against the door behind the still-shimmering, hazy air, wide-eyed but unharmed. He’s trembling like a leaf. 

Lee drops Shinki to the ground and dashes around the sand to his son. He’s on his knees in an instant, arms thrown around Metal, rubbing his shoulders with slow, even pressure.

“Are you okay?” he whispers. “I’m sorry, I bet that was frightening. Everything is all right now. You’re safe. Everyone’s safe.” 

There’s blood on Lee’s bandages. Shinki didn’t think to go after him with the Iron Sand, so focused was he on Metal, but—

Shinki spits onto the floor. There’s red around his mouth. 

—he _bit_ Lee to try to make him let go. 

Lee is stroking Metal’s hair now, making shushing noises. He looks over Metal’s head at Gaara, and the expression in his eyes is warning, sharp. 

Gaara lays a hand on Shinki’s shoulder. 

“You look upset,” he guides him. “Do you remember what I said to do when you feel upset?” 

Shinki glares at him, but his lower lip is stuck-out and quivering. 

“Let’s go outside.” Gaara squeezes Shinki’s shoulder and begins to walk him down the hallway to the back door. 

“Okay, then!” There’s the rustle of Lee getting to his feet, the pattering sound of sand being shaken to the hallway floor. “Let me just get this cleaned up—”

“Don’t,” Gaara turns his head over his shoulder to call. “Shinki will clean up his own mess.” 

“Right.” Lee straightens. He’s holding Metal on his hip, clutching his son protectively to his chest. “We’ll be in the kitchen when you’re finished.”

“Don’t forget to wash out that injury,” Gaara reminds him. 

The last thing he hears before they turn the corner to the back hallway is Metal squirming in Lee’s arms. 

“Papa, you got hurt?”

  


* * *

  


The sun is just setting behind the far wall of the compound, and the dry air is the hazy orange of sunset. It’s been a good few weeks since the last rain, and everything is covered in a fine layer of dust. 

Gaara leads Shinki over to an unmarked stretch of ground, near the jagged stones where the foxes have made their den. A couple curious faces pop over the edge of the rocks to peek at the disturbance, but just as quickly vanish when they notice the interloper. 

Gaara pulses his chakra enough to settle the air, to make it a bit easier to breathe. The sand sweeps out from them in a circle and leaves a clearly delineated flat area on the earth.

“We need to train your control,” Gaara explains. He summons some sand to his palm and holds it out, showing Shinki how he can shape it into a ball, then a cube, then a cactus, then the face of a small desert fox with mica flecks for its bright eyes. “You can’t lash out at people every time you get angry. That’s how people get killed.” 

Shinki crosses his arms over his chest. “If they’re weak, they deserve to get killed.” 

Gaara studies him for a moment, senses the already weakening grip Shinki has on his chakra, the way it’s draining him even as they stand there.

“No.” He sits on the ground, legs crossed, and gestures for Shinki to sit across from him. “If they’re weaker than you, then you have a duty to protect them.” 

Shinki settles into a wary crouch in front of him. Gaara pulls up a bit more sand from the earth and settles it into a pile in front of him. 

“Can you do that? Picture the chakra in your body flowing out through your palms like a stream of water, and let the sand be carried by it.” 

Shinki squints his eyes and holds out his palms. Slowly, the Iron Sand slinks from around his shoulders and forms a pile on the ground of the same size and shape. 

“Good.” Gaara lets his expression soften. “It can be difficult to contain a power as strong as yours. I understand the instinct to work out your emotions with …” He pauses. “... displays of that strength. But it’s better if you direct your frustration towards something you can control. Before I was Kazekage—”

Shinki’s eyes snap to him. They widen as he slowly assembles the pieces of a puzzle Gaara didn’t realize he was still working on. 

“You’re the _Kazekage_,” Shinki breathes. “Sabaku no _Gaara._” All traces of anger are bled from his expression as he leans forward eagerly over the twin piles of sand. “You’re the strongest shinobi there is!”

“No,” Gaara corrects him. “I’m not.”

“But! You’re the Kazekage! You’re everyone’s boss!” The Iron Sand still blanketing Shinki’s shoulders begins to rise and fall with his excitement. 

“I’m the Kazekage because the village trusts me to keep them safe.” Gaara raises a calming hand, and Shinki’s sand settles. “There are many kinds of strength, and many shinobi whose powers exceed my own in any number of disciplines.” 

“No way!” Shinki shakes his head so frantically that Gaara is slightly concerned he’ll give himself whiplash. “My m—” He pauses, lips pursing into a pout. His expression is consternated, his breathing uneven when he continues. “Someone told me that no one’s ever beaten you.”

“That’s simply untrue.” Gaara thins his lips. He knows that his status is somewhat mythical among the villagers, and that to some extent his invulnerability is a necessary fiction for the common comfort, but he privately hoped that such frank lies weren’t still being spread. “I’ve lost many times before. That’s part of growth. You develop your strength through loss and learn from your mistakes to improve. Even Lee came very close to beating me, once.” 

“You fought Lee?” Shinki’s frown deepens. “But you won, right?”

For a moment, Gaara isn’t sure how to respond. He and Lee have never spoken to Metal about their first meeting, about that clash where Gaara nearly ripped Lee’s dreams from his shattered palms and where Lee fractured every rib in Gaara’s chest. Even with the jinchuuriki healing factor he ached for weeks. The pain of his near defeat was raw within him even as he snuck into Lee’s hospital room to snuff him out, because he couldn’t bear the existence of so bright a sun, of someone so adored they would be protected even from Gaara himself. 

“Neither of us won,” he says shortly. “We both nearly lost everything.” 

“But how—?” 

“We didn’t come out here to talk about that,” he cuts Shinki off. “I wanted to teach you a technique for channeling your power when you’re upset. Do you want to learn it?”

“Yes!” Shinki’s face snaps suddenly back into near-comical seriousness, his gaze intent on the little pile of sand beneath Gaara’s spread palms. 

“Good. Now, let’s start with a simple sphere.”

  


* * *

  


The dark of midnight finds Gaara and Lee sitting in bed on their respective sides. 

Gaara has his reading glasses on. He only needs them in dim lighting now, but he suspects it won’t be long until he needs them for all his paperwork. He’s poring over the tiny, scrabbling print of a few last-minute mission reports, squinting as the shadow of Lee’s body shifts over the scrolls. 

Lee is re-reading a favorite fantasy novel of his, half-asleep as he slowly turns the pages. Gaara doubts he’s absorbing any of the tale of the epic hero whose silhouette dominates the book’s cover. His blinking is very slow, very measured. His bandages are in tidy rolls on the bedside table, but there’s a fresh plaster over the bite mark on his forearm where Shinki dug his sharp little teeth in. 

Gaara regrets that one of the first lessons he ever had to give Shinki was about the correct solvent to get blood out of stone. Hopefully he will have to use that knowledge only sparingly. 

Gaara sets the scrolls down on his lap. 

“Lee?” he whispers. 

“Mm?” Lee sets the book face-down and his chest and turns towards Gaara. His hair is already disheveled from the pillow case, and warmth radiates off his body in waves. The fabric of his sleep shirt is very thin and well-worn, all the muscles of his chest and upper arms visible beneath the slightly-too-tight cloth. The shirt fit him well the last time he was here, but Lee’s been focusing on upper body strength training recently, and it shows. 

Gaara resists the urge to simply tuck his head against one of Lee’s broad biceps and let himself be held. 

“I wanted to apologize,” he murmurs. 

Lee’s dark eyes blink open slowly. “For what?” 

“I’m sorry I didn’t react faster,” Gaara explains. “Earlier, when Shinki—” 

“No,” Lee whispers back. One bare, scarred palm comes up to cup the side of Gaara’s face. “I understand why you couldn’t. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there. I think I see why … with your back …” Lee shakes his head. “He’s just—He’s so _young_. And so _angry_.” 

“He’s—” 

A spark of shock runs up Gaara’s spine, and he freezes. 

There’s something happening downstairs in Shinki’s room. Disquiet roils through him, and the gourd hanging by the bedroom door quakes. 

The sand he left by Shinki’s bedside earlier is alerting him. 

Gaara jumps to his feet just as a crash sounds beneath the floorboards. 

He grabs the gourd and throws its harness over his shoulder. Then, without really thinking about why, he snatches his old teddybear off the bookshelf, too. 

The dyscontrol in Shinki’s chakra is obvious the moment he steps into the hall, and Gaara is so focused on it that he doesn’t notice for a moment that Lee is following him. 

“You can stay in bed,” he whispers as he descends the stairs, Lee close on his heels.

“Not a chance,” Lee hisses back. “You’re not in this alone.” 

With four jounin-level shinobi in the house, the hall outside Shinki’s room is crowded. Temari is already hovering warily outside the bedroom door as Kankuro, looking much less alert, clomps up the hallway shirtless with his sleeping cap still on. 

“Go back to bed, both of you,” Gaara dismisses them brusquely. “No sense in us all losing sleep.”

“You think any of us can sleep through _that?_” Temari nods at the door, and the rumble and squeal of the Iron Sand within. 

“Stand back.” 

His siblings obey, but Lee is still at Gaara’s shoulder when he opens the door and steps inside.

The armoire is on its side, one door cracked and hanging off its hinge. Shinki is curled into a ball on the bed with the Iron Sand seething around him. 

Gaara clears his throat. “Shinki,” he says gently. “Shinki, wake up.”

Shinki’s eyes fly wide in an instant, swollen red eyelids around the bright green of his irises. 

His eyes fix on Gaara, then snap to Lee over Gaara’s shoulder. 

“Go away!” he screams. 

Gaara has just enough time to shoot Lee an apologetic look before a wave of Iron Sand shoves him from the room and slams the door. 

Shinki’s leaking chakra like a tapped well, the Iron Sand surging through the room in peaks and troughs, like the shifting dunescape in a windstorm. 

Gaara lays a hand on it and feels the magnetic pull, yanking Shinki’s energy in so many directions they can hardly be counted. He closes his eyes to concentrate—the Iron Sand is not nearly as instinctive as his own natural sand—and in a moment all the grains are orderly, oriented to the north. 

The Iron Sand goes still, then it slinks back to Shinki’s side and wraps back around him. 

“You were having a nightmare,” Gaara says, stooping to gather the blanket that the sand has strewn on the floor and approaching the bed. His own sand picks up the armoire and sets it to rights. They’ll deal with the broken door in the morning. “But you’re safe now.” 

He lays the blanket across Shinki’s trembling body, and the Iron Sand pulls it close around him. After a moment’s hesitation, Gaara sits on the edge of the bed. 

“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asks, as his sand straightens the lampshade and the curtains that have been pulled askew.

Shinki shakes his head vigorously _no_. 

“You don’t have to,” Gaara reassures him. “But it can help to talk about the things that scare you. Some things are less frightening in the light.”

Shinki balls his fists up by his chest. His eyelids crumple shut and his lips purse as he shakes his head once more. 

“I can’t!” 

There’s an echo there of a familiar feeling: _I didn’t know how to explain it._

Gaara nods. “That’s all right. I’ll be here if you change your mind.” 

There’s a moment of quiet before the Iron Sand grabs his hand, tugging it to Shinki’s head. Its grip is surprisingly gentle in its insistence, something very nearly routine about the motion. Gaara rests his fingers on Shinki’s hair, which is sweat-saturated and tangled yet again. 

“There’s a lady out there,” Shinki says drowsily. “In the hall.” 

Shinki was too tired after his impromptu training session and cleaning up the hallway for the social exertions of a proper dinner, so Gaara allowed him to take his meal in his room.

“That’s my sister, Temari.”

Sleepy eyes narrow. “Have you got any more brothers and sisters?”

“No, just Temari and Kankuro.”

Shinki’s lower lip crumples, the sign Gaara has learned to recognize as meaning he’s deep in thought, not near tears as he first worried.

“I don’t have any brothers and sisters.”

Gaara pauses for a moment, takes a breath.

“I know.”

“But I want some.”

“Okay.” Gaara adds it to his mental checklist of ideal foster family characteristics, right below _able to subdue him_ and _trauma-informed_: _has other children._

“I brought you this.” Gaara diverts the conversation from an exploration of Shinki’s former family by holding out the teddy bear. “This is Mr. Teddy.”

One small, pale hand escapes the blankets to latch around the bear’s middle. 

“Is he yours?” Shinki whispers.

Gaara nods.

“Aren’t you worried I’ll ruin him? I ruined everything else.” Shinki’s voice has gone very small, very vulnerable. Whatever airs of intimidation or adulthood he tried to wear earlier, they’ve dissipated now, and all that’s left is this childlike warble. 

Gaara shrugs. “Someone once told me that Mr. Teddy has a special power. It’s a much stronger ability than anything I have in my arsenal.”

Shinki’s eyes drift to the bear’s fuzzy brown face and blank button eyes and widen. 

“A special power.”

“Mr. Teddy can eat nightmares. So they can’t frighten or bother you, and so you can sleep peacefully.”

“Is that really true?” Shinki whispers.

Gaara pauses a moment. It seems improbable, certainly, that a stuffed toy could swallow the bad dreams from a child’s head. It’s likely that the story is nothing more than superstition, conjurations of a magic that doesn’t exist. 

But Gaara has seen gods clash on the battlefield. He’s risen from the dead and seen his own mother’s ghost rise up in his sand to counter his resurrected father’s corpse. 

In light of that, the jutsu work necessary to bewitch a teddy bear hardly seems outside the realm of possibility. 

And Gaara never slept as a child. He had no way of testing whether Yashamaru’s promises were true. He knows he sleeps much better now, with the bear on his bookshelf, and that he doesn’t have it within him to sleep on away missions, even in Konoha, in the safety of Lee’s room. 

“It might be,” he says eventually. It’s not an untruth, simply the breadth of what he knows. 

If he expected Shinki to try to debate the uncertainty, he was mistaken. The boy simply clutches the bear close against his chest and ducks his small face down between its ears. He inhales deeply. 

“Thank you,” Shinki says, muffled by fur and stuffing.

  


* * *

  


Gaara startles awake an hour later with his head on his chest. There’s a drool stain on the front of his shirt. He must have nodded off sitting on Shinki’s bed.

The room is quiet, Shinki’s chakra nothing more than a soft, contented rumble.

Gaara gets to his feet, wincing when his hip joints crack.

Temari and Kankuro are nowhere to be found, but Lee is still waiting for him out in the hallway, sitting propped up against the far wall. His eyes are closed, but Gaara can tell he’s merely waiting, perhaps meditating, but not truly asleep. 

“Lee.” Gaara prods the side of his leg gently with his toe. 

He lets Lee go through the show of pretending to wake up without letting on that he knows that Lee hasn’t slept yet at all. 

“Everything okay?” Lee stretches a hand out, and Gaara pulls him to his feet. 

“He’s asleep for now.” 

“You gave him Mr. Teddy,” Lee remarks, following Gaara back up the stairs. “That was kind of you.”

“He needs it more than me.” 

Back in their bedroom, Gaara pauses by the door. The room is in the same disarray they left it in, the scrolls and Lee’s book strewn across the bedspread. Gaara realizes belatedly that he’s still wearing his glasses, and he takes them off to rub his aching temples. 

He’s saturated with a bone-deep fatigue not dissimilar to chakra exhaustion. He barely keeps himself upright as Lee clears the mess off the bed and sets the scrolls in a sloppy pile on the bedside table. 

“We still need to talk,” he mumbles, as Lee gathers him from near the door and steers him to the mattress. 

“We do,” Lee agrees, with a kiss to the top of Gaara’s head. “But first, we need to sleep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's just one more day to submit prompts for [GaaLee Bingo](https://gaalee-bingo.tumblr.com)! Prompts close on Sept. 30th, and cards will be posted on Oct. 1st!


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